Pictures are worth a thousand words, or so the story goes.  When writing blog posts or any other kind of content on the Internet images are a big key to making the content more understandable and more interesting.  A great way to help manage the images that you use for your site is to make use of a photo-sharing website like Google’s Picasa or Yahoo’s Flickr.

I’m partial to Flickr myself.  One of its advantages is the large community around it that helps to support each others photographic endeavours.  Another is the more recently added Piknic photo-editing service which allows you to make changes and adjustments to your photos directly on the website.

I recently put together this quick “how-to” for a friend of mine and decided that I might as well share it with the world.  Without further ado, here is a step-by-step how-to on adding Flickr images to your WordPress blog.

1. Open the page of the image you want in Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/kmsquared/2195515600/
2. Click on “All Sizes”
3. For most blogs, the “Medium” sized image is usually sufficient.  Its largest side will be 500px with the other scaled to match
4. Right-click the link marked “Download this image” link and “Copy Link Location” (Firefox) or “Copy Shortcut” (Internet Explorer)
5. On your blog, click the “Add Image” button in the editor 
6. Paste in the Image URL from #4 (WP will pick up dimensions automatically)
7. Done!

To add links back to the image in Flickr…

1. Go back to the Flickr page, right-click the “Back to the Flickr photo page” link in the top-left and select “Copy Link Location”
2. In WordPress click on the image that’s been added to your post, and then click the “Add Link” button in the editor.
3. Paste the URL for the Flickr photo page
4. Done!