How to use Tumblr to share your photos online

Decided to share your photos online? It doesn't matter if you want only a select few to see them or if you want to show them to the world — Tumblr can house and showcase your photos, whether they're taken with your phone or with your high-end camera. If you're planning to use Tumblr to promote your work, you'll find its reblogging culture especially useful. As a blogging platform, Tumblr's easy to work with — no need to learn fancy codes to make it work. All you need is the content you want to post and an internet connection.

Setting up your Tumblr account
You can sign up for an account as soon as you land on Tumblr. When you're done, you'll be redirected to your dashboard, a combination of a blogging interface and a friends list news feed. Tweak and personalize your account once you've verified your email address. At the top right of the dashboard, you'll see a number of icons; click the one that looks like a plus sign inside a circle to set up a new blog. If you want to share your Tumblr posts and photos only to a select few, tick password protect and create a password to keep unwanted visitors out of your blog!

You can create multiple Tumblr blogs on one account and even make group-moderated blogs, if you want to curate them with friends or family. To create a group blog, click on the blog's name that becomes an option at the top of the dashboard once you create it, and find the members option at the right-hand column. Use the invite feature to share running the blog with anyone you want to!

Choosing themes and creating new pages
Next stop: making the Tumblr blog your own. Click the blog name on the top menu to see an option in the right-hand column that lets you customize its appearance. A new Tumblr blog always starts out with the site's default skin. Don't worry — you have numerous themes to choose from, both paid and free. Some themes follow the usual blog layout, while others are designed to better showcase the photos you take.

You can change several design aspects of your Tumblr site on the customization page, including the fonts, header and background images. In the right column, you'll find an option for adding new pages (such as a section for your information and details) separate from the blog itself.

Sharing your photos on Tumblr
Now that you're done setting up your Tumblr blog, you can start sharing your images! The simplest way to do so is to go to your dashboard, choose the photo option, and upload the photo of your choice. You can upload files up to 10MB in size in .jpg, .gif, .png, or .bmp formats.

A 10MB image is already large, and chances are your phone saves images in one of those formats. But in case your photo still doesn't fit either criteria, we have a guide here at Tecca that walks you through what to do after taking pictures as well as alternate apps to use if you don't have popular image editing software Adobe Photoshop.


Do you want to create a series of related images? Tumblr has a feature called photosets that lets you upload more than one picture to display as a gallery. To enable the feature, just click the same photo option within the dashboard, and click the Add another photo button to upload more than one image.

If you have several images to share but don't want to create a gallery, queue several posts so they'll go live on Tumblr at intervals, or use the "publish on…" option that lets you schedule posts on your own. You can make private posts if you just want to store an image without sharing it.

Bookmarklets and reblogging
You can easily share photos from your Flickr account or other image storage services through Tumblr's bookmarklet tool. Go to Tumblr's goodies page to find the bookmarklet — installing it is as easy as dragging it to your browser's bookmarks bar. Just load your image from any website, and click the bookmarklet tool. On the window that pops up, input a description of the image, and tag it!

Speaking of tags, they're very useful in promoting your photos, considering Tumblr has a tag search option in its dashboard. Looking for the most useful tags for maximum exposure potential? Hit the Explore Tumblr button on the dashboard to see the most popular tags and search terms.

If you have a website you want to promote, use the "Set a click-through link" at the bottom or the content source text box in the right-hand menu when creating a post. If you want to network with other Tumblr users, make full use of the reblog function; you'll see a reblog button at the bottom of the screen of every Tumblr post. Reblog will direct you back to your dashboard, where you can fix settings as you would for your own posts or leave a caption at the bottom — we suggest that you do the latter. A popular Tumble gets thousands of reblogs (which are all documented as Notes at the bottom of each post), and leaving a comment on yours makes it stand out from the crowd.

Twitter and Facebook integration
Tumblr features seamless integration with both Twitter and Facebook. Go to Tumblr Goodies, where you got your bookmarklet tool, and install the Facebook and Twitter apps. Now, every Tumble you do gets automatically cross-posted on your other social networks! It's a good way to entice your Facebook friends and Twitter followers to connect with you on Tumblr, too.


Share directly from your mobile devices
You can access Tumblr on your phone's browser any time. But for hassle-free mobile sharing, consider using Tumblr's apps for iPhone, BlackBerry, and Android devices. Just search for the Tumblr app on your platform's app store, or access direct links to them on Tumblr's Goodies page. Besides the official apps, you'll find numerous unofficial ones. Installing a Tumblr app on your phone or tablet means you can post images directly from your gallery (or mobile image editing apps like Instagram) right after you take them. Talk about convenient!

Personalize even more
Now that you know the essentials of Tumblr, you can start personalizing your blog even more. Tumblr lets you override your default URL with a .com address of your own. Customize your themes by adding custom scripts and overhauling the HTML code. And if you want to monitor your Tumblr blog's traffic, you can integrate Google Analytics.

Happy Tumbling!

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