I use google spreadsheets to track all of my plants. I wanted to be able to easily link (click) to photos of each plant on my Flickr account. Here's how I did it.

In my sheet, I use column B for the name of the plant. Here is a screenshot of the first 5 entires in my sheet (column B). Note that there are many other columns of data containing addition info such as height, bloom, description, etc.



In another column, I convert the text in Column B into web friendly text. Specifically, I convert all the spaces to %20, which is the web equivalent to space.

I use column T for this conversion. T13 looks like this: =SUBSTITUTE(B13," ","%20"). Of course, T14 looks like this: =SUBSTITUTE(B14," ","%20").

In that same row, I have an cell entry that looks like this:

=HYPERLINK("https://www.flickr.com/search/?user_id=50697352%40N00&sort=date-posted-desc&text="&T13,"flickr")

this is the clickable cell. If you have a flickr account, you can figure out this URL by doing a search of your photos & recording the URL.

So, when I click on this link in my spreadsheet, I search my Photos on Flickr for this plant entry. This is especially interesting if you have been taking photos of a given plant every year. For example, I have plants that I have taken photos of for several years, clicking on my sheet link, opens up a page with all of the photos (this is cool!).

When I add new plants to my sheet, it automatically fills in the search data. Of course, new plant items will usually not produce any search results for my Flickr photos:) However, I am starting to take photos of purchased potted plants, before I plant them. And, yes, I have been taking photos of tubers and roots prior to planting.

With modification, you can use any web photo site to do this. Picasa or Smugmug, for example. Also, I use this method to link to a google image search of my plant entry. Many times after I add a plant to my sheet, I manually copy the name and do a google search in another browser tab. This makes it much easier, just a click away:)

For my sheet, the google image link looks like this:

=HYPERLINK("https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&site=imghp&tbm=isch&source=hp&biw=1687&bih=1083&q="&T13,"g")

life is good.

Thank you for that Frank!!

Some day I will do this. I am going to star this post for future!

I stand in awe of your organizational skills! Amazing. I have trouble keeping my seed packets in alphabetical order... Good job.

That's fantastic! I gave up trying to add pics to an Excel spreadsheet. This type of remote file can't be lost if your computer crashes also. I've found the list facility here on ATP fulfills my needs (except a few details like not being able to sort it various ways, and trying to visually ignore the common names while I look through the list for a particular plant.) Thanks for sharing!