// Pocket Picks //

Being able to take photographs with your mobile phone is great – there are hundreds of moments every week where you see something notable and, with a camera in your pocket in the shape of your phone, you can snap it almost immediately. Whether it’s boozing royals, terrorist arrests or early-awakening bumblebees, you can picture it.

But what do you do with the photos once they’re on your phone? Unless you’ve got a USB cable or Bluetooth connection to your PC, it can be difficult and expensive to transfer them from one to the other and even then, showing the photos to other people is far from straightforward.

These problems are set to be a thing of the past, however, with a free service called ShoZu. ShoZu has formed a partnership with everyone’s favourite photo-sharing site Flickr, the result of which means you can send your cameraphone photos directly to a personal page you create online at Flickr.

Once there you can give friends and family the URL so they can see what you’ve been snapping and download the photos to your PC for printing at home.

So, without further ado, ShoZu:
Step 1

Open your internet browser and go to www.shozu.com/flickr. You’ll first need to sign up to ShoZu, even if you’ve got an existing Flickr account, so click on the Sign Up button and follow the instructions, choosing your phone model. When you select your handset you’ll be shown the features that it supports – some phones support more than others – and what they are. Some handsets even enable you to back-up your contacts list with ShoZu!

Step 2

Next you’ll enter your contact details and your mobile phone number. Select your region and country and then enter your number. Because ShoZu is an international service, leave the first zero from the number, so ‘07725…’ would become ‘7725…’. The text will arrive within a few minutes and when it does, open it and then go to the link included within it. You’ll need to connect to the internet via your phone, something it’ll do automatically, and it’ll download the ShoZu software. Confirm you want to install it, then exit your phone’s browser.

Step 3

Now you’ll have ShoZu installed on your phone, so browse to your handset’s applications menu and start it up. Click on Options and then on Activate, entering the username and password that you chose just now, using the phone’s keypad to enter the letters and numbers. A connection will be made to the ShoZu server to validate the software, and this can take a couple of minutes, so be patient.

Step 4

One last step before you can start uploading your photos and that’s to set the destination that they’re going to be uploaded to. From within the ShoZu home screen on your phone, click on Share It and then on Destinations. There will be no destinations shown, so click on Options and then on Add New Destination. Follow the instructions on your phone to add Flickr. Alternatively, open ShoZu on your PC and log in. Go to the Share-It page and select a destination before opening ShoZu on your phone and using the Check For Updates command.

Step 5

You’re now ready – finally – to begin uploading your photos. You can do so by opening ShoZu and clicking on All Files. This will open an image browser, enabling you to view the photos and videos that you’ve got stored on your phone. Select the image or images you want to upload and then click on Options and Send To. The image you selected will be send over your mobile phone’s internet connection and an icon next to the image will show its upload status so you can track its progress.

Step 6

If you’ve used Flickr or a site like it before, you’ll know a big part of the appeal is the ability to add descriptions and comments to the photos you upload. This gives you the chance to add details to accompany pictures and for the people who view your photos to leave their own comments. You can add a description to a photo before or after you upload it and add a tag, too, so the image can be categorised.