flickr

Flickr is a photo-sharing website where anyone can upload and tag photos, browse others' photos, and add comments and annotations. It provides a platform for sharing creative work and allows users to engage in a conversation about a photo, building a sense of community and enabling collective knowledge construction. The 7 Things You Should Know About Flickr, EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative’s (ELI) latest brief in the monthly series, examines how Flickr embodies what has come to be known as Web 2.0 technology.

Browse the complete 7 Things You Should Know About… monthly series.

I teach a survey of art history class. I use digital images in the classroom and online. While I have several thousand of my own images, my collection is far from comprehensive in chronology and in geography. Arkansas State University twice purchased digital images under a contract with Saskia and others that places severe restrictions on where and how the images may be used (they may be seen only by faculty and students of the university under a secure sign-in system).

I discovered that Flickr has a large store of digital images that may be used for educational purposes. Of these hundreds deal with art and architecture (mostly architecture and sculpture, but with some surprisingly good images of paintings). I never prepare a presentation for my students without checking the holdings of Flickr. Additionally, when I find a particularly good source of images, I bookmark it in del.icio.us so that I may quickly find the collections (under imagearchive) and also share what I have found with others.

Looking for a new camera? The new flickr camera site may be just what you need. You can browse cameras by brand and see who is uploading what kinds of pictures using each different camera.

Unfortunately site is not independent, flickr has a deal with Nikon which leads to prominent placement of Nikon camera, in particular the Nikon D80. Personally I use a Canon 400d/ Xti, and increasingly understand that the camera is not the limiting factor in my photography...  

cheers, stuart

Most of us have been to events where participants take photos, but what happens to them at the end of the event?

Recently while taking photos at an event I was good-naturedly hassled about pictures I'd taken at a previous event with the same attendees. I'd put the photos, taken in a semi-private space, up on flickr.

I love taking pictures at events, because it means I have a permanent visual record of the people and the places. It means that in 12 months when a participant emails me I can reacquaint myself with the face that matches the name and email address. It also gives me something to illustrate my blog with.

On reflection, I believed I could do better than just blatting all the images up publicly on flickr. After a little editorial work (i.e. throwing out the really bad ones), I uploaded them to flickr privately and emailed the participants of the event the URLs of the images they're in, to give them the option of veto. This works because flickr uses authorisation only for HTML pages, images' privacy is protected due to the obscurity of the URL. All but one participant got back to me and approved the images. I have no idea whether the remaining participant objected to their photos, didn't receive the email or just never got around to responding. Once I'd had the bulk of the responses I started to make the images public.