Friday

Thing #5 Explore Flickr and learn about this popular image hosting site

Photo sharing websites have been around since the 90s, but it took a small startup site called Flickr (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.

Read 7 Things You Should Know About Flickr.

As you know, not all images on the Internet are copyright-friendly. That is also true with Flickr photos.

However, Flickr has arranged separate collections based on the copyright-friendly Creative Commons rules. The photos found on Flickr can be downloaded and used by visitors to the site.

Discovery Exercise:

1. Take a good look around Flickr and discover waht the site has to offer. Find out how tags work, what groups are, and all the neat things that people and other libraries are creating thanks to Flickr.

2. Visit the Flickr Creative Commons site and explore what kinds of photos you could use for you library or classroom assignments. Do a search using a keyword or two from your subject or curriculum. Save a photo to your hard drive (Desktop or My Pictures). Add that photo to your Thing #5 posting and post about the experience.

NOTE: Do not use the Search box found on the top right side--it takes you to the general collection where not all photos are part of the Creative Commons collection. Here is some help in downloading photos from the site (from the Spring Branch ISD wiki).


Optional Exercise: If you are up to an easy challenge ... create a Free account in Flickr and use your digital camera to capture a few pictures of something in your school library. Upload these to your Flickr account and tag at least one of the images “esc1library” 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. Click here to view an esc1library post using Flickr's blogging tool. 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.


PS: A quick word about photo posting etiquette - When posting identifiable photos of other people (especially minors) 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.

Discovery Resources:
· Flickr Services (3rd party applications & mashups) and here's another Flickr site that lets you create movie posters, CD covers, magazine covers and so on.
· 365 Days of Library Pictures in Flickr.



[Note: Please remember to include WEEK# and THING# in your heading posts.]

5 comments:

mgtz said...

Seems like Flickr can be used for curriculum purposes wherever images would help the delivery or enhancement of instruction. Some educational sites have listed use of Flickr for writing prompts, PPT presentations, teaching of geography, virtual field trips, etc. good thing that the Comoons section is made available as this provides protection against commiting a copyright infringment as long as credit is properly given. I need to review the copyright regulations, but how about when there was a strong desire to use a photograph that was not part of the Commons? Would asking permission from photographer to use in school application plus giving due credit be enough as long as it was not used for profitable purposes? I think this would be a good teaching opportunity.

Maggie said...

Alright! This is now getting into the neat stuff! Flickr is really neat! I already created an account and uploaded some photos. Cool stuff. I am having a tiny bit of trouble finding the Creative Commons collections, but I'm still looking. Creating the account and uploading pictures was pretty user-friendly. Incidently, I'm taking the Intel training at my district and I'm also learning about blogs and wikis there, so this is turning out to be one really productive summer! I'm also learning about Delicious accounts there...really looking forward to learning more about EVERYTHING!

Oh, I forgot to explain about a neat feature of Flickr--you can add tags to your photos so that it makes it easy for others to find your photos and for you to find theirs. They are basically words that can be used for searches. For example, I added a picture of a wedding cake topper and tagged it using the following words: wedding, cake, topper, funny, etc. These words will make it easy to for those looking for such things to find.

To find the Creative Commons collections: click on EXPLORE and scroll down to CREATIVE COMMONS. It's important to be familiar with the Creative Commons Rules so that you know how you are allowed to use each of those collections.

Ok, downloading a picture onto the desktop was a piece of cake...now I gotta' figure out a way to add it to this post....I don't think I saw the instructions on the 23 Things page.

The Reader said...

Week #3 Thing 5: I like the way several applications can be intertwined to create collages,etc. The massive collection of pictues is very useful to people. I particularly like that we can store our pictures and organize them on Flickr.

The Reader said...

Week #3 Thing 5: I like the way several applications can be intertwined to create collages,etc. The massive collection of pictues is very useful to people. I particularly like that we can store our pictures and organize them on Flickr.

The Reader said...

Week Three Thing 5: I just posted pictures on Flickr. my set is called True Library. It is viewed only by friends. They are labeled esc1libraryHoustonHCISD..etc.

Please look then up.