Photo Moblogging to Any Blog Service

The aforementioned photo moblogging solutions tie you into specific bloghosting services. But in many cases, you do not want this tie-in:

You could be running your own blog server and do not use any of the blog hosting services.

Your favorite blog host might not provide photo moblogging features.

You might not want to pay the extra money to add photo moblogging support.

Is there a service that is free and independent of your blog server? As it turns out there is, and it's called Flickr.

Flickr (http://www.flickr.com) started out as a photo storage provider. The one feature that makes Flickr really interesting from a moblog point of view is that it allows you to upload photos (to Flickr) by email and create a blog entry at your designated blog site. The blog site can be any of the blog hosts mentioned in the previous section, or even your own web site running popular blog server software.

The post includes the email content as its main body and an inline thumbnail, which is linked to the picture stored on Flickr. The thumbnail posting feature in Flickr is really cool and sets it apart from other services, especially if you have a camera phone that produces megapixel pictures. Without resizing to thumbnails, megapixel pictures would clutter up your blog and mess up the web page layout (e.g., sidebars, etc.).

The free account at Flickr allows you to upload up to 20 MB of photos per month. A subscription fee of $24.95 per year will push the quota to 2 GB per month. Considering most (mobile phone) moblog attachments are smaller than 100 KB, the free Flickr account is more than sufficient for even the most aggressive mobloggers. Combining the Flickr email posting service with a free blog-hosting service (or your own blog server), you can set up a powerful and free moblog with photo posting in no time!