Item 5: Photos & Images - Discover Flickr

This item will focus on photos and Flickr.

Photo sharing websites have been around for several years. Flickr, though, is different - it's half photo sharing and half online community. How so? Flickr makes incredibly intelligent use of linking keyword 'tags' to create associations between photos and between users.

Let us illustrate.

Take a look at this photo on the King County Library System Flickr profile (this link will open in a new window). Look to the right side of the page and scroll down until you see the label 'Tags.' Click on the 'library architecture' tag - this will quickly display all other photos with the same tag in their Flickr account.

Now click on the link that says 'see all public photos tagged with 'libraryarchitecture.' This is where we get into the online community part of Flickr - just as quickly as we saw other library architecture photos in the KCLS account, we're now seeing similarly themed photos from other Flickr members.

Let's have Flickr fill in some of the blanks - take a look at their FAQ page on tags. And, if for no other reason that it's so well done, take a look at the image below - it was posted by Flickr user cambodia4kidsorg.


The above photo illustrates the beauty of tags - there are many many ways to describe whatever it is you are looking at in a photo (in this case: Pen, Marker, Sharpie, Purple). Why not include them all as tags?

Flickr also makes use of groups. Groups are communities of like minded photo posters. And, yes, there are quite a few groups with a library theme. Let Flickr fill in the rest of the blanks - take a look at their FAQ page on groups.

Resources:

• Flickr Learn More tour (6 steps)
  
• Mediamazine Flickr Tutorials
  
• Flickr: Popular tags
  Interesting- Last 7 days
  
• Flickr Services (3rd party applications & mashups)
  and let’s not forget to look at some other libraries on Flickr

And now for the activities!

Activities:

1. Learn about Flickr through the Flickr Learn more tour and other tutorials.
2. Look around Flickr and find an interesting image you want to blog about. Be sure to include either a link to the image or a copy of the image itself in your blog post. For the latter, you can either use Blogger's photo upload feature or Flickr's blogging tool (you'll need to set up a Flickr account of your own for this).