Vermont’s 23 Things

#5 Flickr

Photo sharing websites have been around since the 90s, but it took a small startup site called Flickr (and now owned by Yahoo) to catapult the idea of “sharing” into a full blown online community. Flickr uses “tags” or what we would call keywords to help identify and search for photos. For this discovery exercise, you are asked to take a good look at Flickr and discover what this site has to offer. Find out how tags work, what groups are, and how people and other libraries are using Flickr.

Resources:

Flickr Learn More tour (6 steps)
Mediamazine Flickr Tutorials
Flickr: Popular tags
Interesting- Last 7 days
Flickr Services (3rd party applications & mashups)
another Flickr site that lets you create movie posters, CD covers, magazine covers and so on.

Exercise:

In this exercise, you have two options…

a. Take a good look around Flickr and discover an interesting image that you want to blog about. Be sure to include either a link to the image or if you create a Flickr account, you can use Flickr’s blogging tool to add the image in your post. If you want more abilitiy to customize where the picture is inserted into your blog, and you’re using Blogger, you can use Blogger’s photo upload tool instead of Flickr’s blogging tool. In Blogger, you have the option to link to an image or upload an impage. So you can either link to the photo URL in Flickr or you can download the Flickr photo and then upload it into Blogger.

b. If you have access to a digital camera, create a Free account in Flickr and take a few pictures of something in your library. Upload these to your Flickr account and tag at least one of the images “vermontlibrarieslearn” and mark it public. Then create a post in your blog about your photo and experience. Be sure to include the image in your post. Once you have a Flickr account, you have two options for doing this; through Flickr’s blogging tool or using Blogger’s photo upload feature.

So go ahead, explore the site and have some Flickr photo fun and if you’re interested in looking at some photo hosting sites, then check out Picasa Web Albums from Google and another service called Smugmug.

** A quick word about photo posting etiquette - When posting identifiable photos of other people (especially minors) is it advisable to get the person’s permission before posting their photo in a publicly accessible place like Flickr. Never upload pictures that weren’t taken by you (unless you have the photographer’s consent) and always give credit when you include photos taken by someone else in your blog. Also, you might want to check out the Creative Commons licensing explanations in Flickr - you can search by license type.