Quick Tip: Uploading Photos from Your iPhone

A kitten on an iPhone at (HDR) sunset

Want to upload photos straight from your iPhone? And have them be automatically geotagged? You could use one of the great Flickr apps available in the App Store, or you could just use Flickr’s upload by email feature.

To get started you’ll need to setup your upload by email address, and geo privacy preferences.

Getting Started

1. Choose “Your Account” from the “You” menu and go to the Email tab. Either you’ll see an option to Create an upload-to-flickr email address, or you’ll see a address of the form “gibberish@photos.flickr.com”.

2. Add that email address to your Contacts on your iPhone, and give it a name like “Flickr Uploadr”.

3. If you’d like your photos automatically geotagged and placed on the map by the iPhone’s built in GPS you’ll need to enable Import EXIF location data (just check “Yes please, that would be lovely”). If you haven’t already set your Geo privacy preferences do so when prompted.

And you’re all set up!

Upload a photo


To upload a photo you’ve either just taken, or are viewing on the Camera Roll, click the upload/use button, choose “Email Photo”, and send the email to the “Flickr Uploadr” contact you just created. And you’re done!

If you give the email a subject, that will become the title of the photo. If you add a description to the email, we’ll try to use that as the description.

Of course upload by email works on almost any device that can send email (which is everything except your toaster these days), not just the iPhone.

And you folks who tried uploading photos by email from your iPhones and were frustrated by crummy resolution, and lack of EXIF (including location) data, it’s time to come back and try it again. The current iPhone software has addressed a bunch of these issues.

Photo from bitrot.