A picture is worth a thousand words and nothing spiffs up the sight of your favourite website like a few well-chosen photos of our peninsular paradise. Got a shot you want to share with your neighbours and the world? Got a snap that's just too pertinent to the topic? You can post it here, and it's a bit of a tangle to get set up, but once you have it, it's a breeze to shoot and post

Here's how ...

If you have a digital camera, or better still, if you have one of those nifty camera cell-phones, you can post your South Bruce Peninsular shots directly to your SBP blog faster than you can change film on a Browning! Here's the recipe I use:

1. Get a Flickr.com account -- Sail over to www.flickr.com and open a free photo hosting account. Flickr is an ex-Canadian project recently bought up by Yahoo!, so you can use your Yahoogroups signon if you have one.

2. Set up Email-To-Flickr -- Under the 'Tools' section, follow the instructions to set up a Flickr email address; to post your photos from your camera, you can upload using the webform or any of a number of desktop programs, but you can also send images as email attachments, and if you have a camera-cellphone with email, you can send your images directly from your phone to your Flickr page.

3. Set up a photo-blog address -- in addition to that email method, there is an option to set up modified address, usually codeword2blog@photos.flickr.com which will post to your Flickr page and then post the image linked to the email text as a new entry on your blog

   To post to the SBP, use the following settings:

   1. Blog Type: MoveableType

   2. Post URL: http://sbp.teledyn.com/xmlrpc.php

   then give it your usual SBP login name and password.

4. Choose a Posting Template: -- I chose the medium size because the large size takes up too much screen space on the SBP front page; if folks want to see the bigger picture, they will click on it to go to the full thing anyway.

That's all there is to it!

There are many photo-sharing websites, and some of them also offer services to form your thumbnail image into a fragment of HTML suitable for cut and paste into the edit box here, but of all those I've seen, none make it as easy as Flickr. When I see something worthy of a post, here's all I have to do:

1. Take the photo

2. View the Image Menu and select 'Send by Email'

3. Set the TO: field to the flickr-to-blog address

4. Set the SUBJECT: to be my blog post title

5. Set the BODY: part to be a few words about the photo

6. Click SEND

It is that easy. The post is up and posted within seconds, nicely formatted, rightly sized, and if I have more to say about it, I can always go back to the website later and edit the blog posting. The other very nice feature of Flickr is that while I can only have one direct email to blog address, I can have any number of blog addresses; to post to the other blogs, I email my photo just to my Flickr account page, and then later load that page into my browser (on my cellphone if I want) and click the link to send that shot on to the selected blog.

It's easy, it's fun, and it really adds to the storyboard here on the ol' SBP! :)