Twitter Flickr

A new feature has come to Flickr, the photo-sharing service, that means you can post notifications and other announcements about your photos to your Twitter account from Flickr itself.

The new feature is simple to set up and works well, as a test tweet I did indicates.

Once set up, you can click on a ‘Blog this’ button on a photo page when available (account holders can turn off this feature on their photos, so you may not always see it).

You’ll get a page similar to the screenshot above where you can type your text in a text box, up to 116 characters (leaving the balance between that and 140 for the short URL).

Then you post the entry and get a tweet!

Many people will find it a useful feature that lets you broadcast details of your pics (and videos) on Flickr to your community on Twitter.

The only hesitation I have is thinking about other means I’ve already set up that include Flickr photos in notifications that go out to my Twitter community, all of them automated.

Friendfeed, for instance, which notes every time I post photos to Flickr. Mobypicture, too, which cross-posts photo uploads to my Flickr account, and which get auto-tweeted.

So I’d want to think carefully about tweeting so that I don’t overload everyone with information they may already have via other means.

But if you don’t have any other means set up, then you’ll find this handy.

Note the URL shortening service Flickr uses – their own.

The wording you see when you set this up and when you want to tweet a photo suggests to me that it’s an extension, so to speak, of what Flickr already had set up for posting info about pics from Flickr to a blog and via email to Flickr – “Blog this photo” and other descriptors aren’t how you’d talk about Twitter.

And the only thing I can’t see clearly is whether tweets get sent automatically whenever you upload photos to Flickr, or whether it works only if you manually tweet one, as I did in the test. I think it’s manual only (I’ll find out on the next uploads I do; if it’s different, I’ll update this post).

Still, it’s a great additional service from Flickr.