Flickr Exercise, Take 2

Rainier Aurora 2,
originally uploaded by Dan Hershman.

This is my attempt to post a Flickr photo through Flickr's Blog It feature. Interestingly enough, I could write my blog in Flickr and it wills still show up with my blog! Unfortunately, there's no formatting features, and I have to go back into Edit Posts to fix that. Now if I can retroactively go back to my first Flickr post and add the picture right...

The Order: Play with Flickr.

What can I say? I am thorough. When I first created Flickr and looked at its features, I sort of already explored some of the mashups and third party applications available. However, I did stop to look at the mashups mentioned if I haven’t explored them before.

I wasn’t too impressed with Mappr, since it didn’t look too attractive with photos on a map (unless the map is huge enough) and it would be a bit of work to print off something huge enough to see the photos. I already looked at the Color Pickr for #20 and was amazed at the pictures pulled up in shades I thought would be hard to find. Spell with Flickr had some interesting effects, but I didn’t care for the images of the letters used and I didn’t like being unable to choose the design for the letter. It was fun in the randomness, but a letdown in the lack of personal input.

Mongtagr was pretty cool, pulling photos from Flickr to make a mosaic of a particular picture. Unfortunately, Montagr pulls any pictures of the right color even if it’s not part of the theme. I looked at sunsets and felt the effect was ruined when I saw that some of the photos were of people who made up the right colors for the sunset Montagr put together.

I checked out the Trading Card Maker from FD Toys and had a little trouble because the picture I used was too big. I didn’t realize the size of my picture mattered, and I can’t see how to resize the picture before inserting it. Otherwise, I thought it was a fun way to make our own library-themed cards to use. Hmm, my brain’s whirling with ideas for what we can do with them!

Learning 2.0 is all about discovery and playing around with the internet tools available to us (if we know about them), but I can’t believe we actually need to be assigned to play! Really, what workaholics we are.

Tag! You’re It!

To be perfectly honest I didn’t find much to learn with this lesson, since I already looked at the help menu in Flickr and read up on tags after creating an account. Perhaps Thing 21 was to catch those people who jumped right into Flickr (and maybe created a Flickr account) without looking too deeply into what makes Flickr’s searches work. And that is tags (presumably).

Tagging your pictures allows you to organize your pictures with descriptive tags and to search for particular pictures because of their subject matter (hence, tags). In the bigger context of the Flickr community, tagging allows your pictures to get grouped with other similar pictures based on themes and location. The Flickr community is different from other photosharing websites because members can add tags, comments and descriptions to another’s pictures.

I wasn’t too impressed with the “10 Ways to Use Flickr in Your Library” article, except maybe for the idea of the virtual tour of the library. That would be a way to market the library (and let the VA residents who don’t know the library discover it). The idea of “highlighting new materials” seems like a waste of time, and doesn’t work too well with our procedure of sending new materials to fulfill holds….unless Collection Management or Cataloguing would take the pictures before sending them to all the libraries. My only concern with posting library pictures are any including customers. How would a parent feel knowing that we have a picture of their child posted on the internet for all to see? Flickr would be good for publicity, but not for the resulting headache of jumping through all the privacy hoops.

Capture the Moment…and Then Share It!

I started off my Flickr experience with a groan. I have to create yet another account/profile? With Yahoo this time. At least Flickr makes it easy to upload images from Flickr onto your blog, though you have to set up that between Flickr and your blog account. After grumbling about it some more, I finally sat down to explore Flickr, and I was impressed with the photos I saw there. Then I grew overwhelmed. With all these great photos there, why do I need to add mine?

To avoid the topic of which pictures to upload to my account, I looked around at some of Flickr’s services and features. I stumbled onto Flickr’s Interestingness feature that has highlights of some of the remarkable photos from different dates to look at. And Flickr’s boast that it is easy to loose track of time while looking through these photos was definitely true. (This is how I found my interesting image to share.)

It was exciting (and humbling) to see what other people have used Flickr for in the third party applications of Flickr services. If you want pictures of a certain shade of color, you can pick one from the Color Picker; I was awed by some of the pictures I found matching the colors I selected. You can make motivational posters or customized movie posters by simply selecting a photo from your files, filling in the information blanks and then you get an instant poster! I was tickled by the busy message while your poster is made: “Digitizing your wisdom, great one...Please wait.”

I gave a cursory glance through some of the libraries using Flickr, and it reminded me of the photo archives in our W drive except online. This got me thinking. Wouldn’t it be great to have an online photo archive? This way, all the photo files won’t take up so much room on the W drive. We would also be able to share these photos with other libraries from all over the world!