Flickr is one of the most well known online photo sharing networks for both amateurs and professionals. And because they’ve been around since 2004, it’s also one of the most widely used.

In the MailChimp V5 release, we’ve made it super easy to link your Flickr photos to your MailChimp account, pull them into your image gallery, and use ‘em in your email campaigns.

When you’re editing your campaign’s content and are ready to add images, click on the little gallery icon in the editor’s toolbar.

The gallery will open in a pop-up window and you’ll see a Flickr Images button at the top. Click it! (Go on, you know you want to)

The next window that pops up will ask you to authorize MailChimp to access your Flickr account. If you’re not logged into Flickr, you’ll be asked to do that before you’re taken to the authorization page.

When you upload your photos to Flickr, you have the option to tag them with keywords that will help you find them later. Since I knew I was searching for photos from our holiday party, and that I had tagged those photos accordingly in Flickr, searching for “holiday” brought up exactly what I was looking for. If you don’t tag your photos or can’t remember what terms you might have used, you can also simply click the “view all photos” button to bring up your most recent (max of 100) photos.

Then simply click the import link to pull an image into your MailChimp photo gallery. (Since our Flickr integration is in its first iteration you’ll have to pull the images into your gallery one at a time.)

Once you’ve imported all the photos you want to use in your email, click on settings at the top of the gallery window to get some additional information about your images. You can sort them by list view (the same way you might see them displayed in a directory on your computer) or a grid of thumbnails. In addition, you can display the file name, the date and time the image was imported into the gallery, and the file size. These refinements are all designed to make using the image gallery a more elegant experience and we welcome your feedback about them.

When you’re ready to add images to your campaign, you’ll now have your Flickr photos at your fingertips. Just be sure to remember to scale them down to dimensions that will fit your template.

See also:

• Image Gallery and iStockPhoto Integration