In part one of this series, I showed how easy it is to create your own free photoblog using WordPress.com and Flickr. Now that you know how to create your own photoblog, I’m going to share my tips for maintaining an efficient photoblogging workflow.
1. Offload Your Pictures to Your Computer
After you’ve taken your pictures, you’ll need to transfer them from your camera to your computer in order to upload them. On my computer, I keep a “Flickr pictures” folder specifically for this task. Inside this folder, I keep a subfolder called “Archive”. Once I’ve uploaded my pictures to Flickr, I will move my photos to the “Archive” folder. This way, I have my photos backed up in two places: my computer and online.
The key principle in this step is: Don’t waste time organizing your pictures on your computer’s hard drive. Think of your computer as the tool you use to get your pictures to Flickr. In addition, having your pictures in one folder on your hard drive makes it easy to back up that folder to a DVD or other storage media.
2. Organize Your Photos While You Upload to Flickr
During the upload process, I use Flickr’s uploading tool to categorize, tag, sort and group my photos. I’ve found this process much more efficient than trying to maintain any sort of organization on my local computer.
Flickr lets you group your photos into sets and collections. For example, you might create a collection called “Hikes” and a set of pictures from one hike within that collection.
In addition, Flickr also lets you “tag” your photos. Tagging is the process of adding short descriptive words to your photos that allows for further sub categorization. Getting back to our previous “hiking” example, you might tag a photo from a hike with “outdoors, summer, mountains, bear attack, frightening” etcetera. 
Furthermore, if you’re really crunched for time or have a lot of photos, you can always upload them and then organize them later.
3. Post to Your Heart’s Content
Once you’ve got your pictures uploaded to Flickr, if you followed the steps in the previous tutorial, now you can browse over to your Flickr account whenever the occasion strikes you and simply post a photo to your photoblog. Perhaps you’ll want to get in the habit of posting a new photo to your blog everyday, or maybe you’ll be less frequent with your updates. The great thing about this setup is that you’ll have the freedom to operate however you choose.
Conclusion
Perhaps you’re thinking, “Wait, we can’t be finished! There must be more steps!?” That’s my point exactly. Working with your photoblog should be a painless process. Your photoblog should accent your creativity, not hinder it.
Hopefully, this two-part series has helped you to see how easy it is to start and maintain a photoblog. If this series has helped you create your own photoblog, please leave a comment with a link to your site. In addition, be sure to ask a question if something isn’t too clear, or leave your own favorite photoblog tip.