EDUCAUSE | flickr

New ELI Brief Explores Interactive Photo-Sharing Website

pkurkowski — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 12:47:54 -0600

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.

Flickering (or is that Flickring?)

wallen — Sat, 02 Feb 2008 14:09:33 -0600

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.

The image resources on the web, especially those that offer material unrestricted or under a Creative Commons license.

flickr camera comparison

StuartYeates — Tue, 21 Nov 2006 02:53:50 -0600

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

Event Photos

StuartYeates — Mon, 13 Nov 2006 03:37:22 -0600

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.

Now this was quite a bit of work. I had to: (a) write a form email; (b) track down everyone's email address; (c) match people to email address; (d) send off customised emails to everyone, (e) then track who respondedand (f) make public images that everyone had OK'd. But a bit more thought suggests that this could potentially be cut down hugely using an appropriate tool. In particular (a), (d) and (e) could be completely automated using a stateless tool and flickr. (b) and (c) would require a more sophisticated tool, with semantic web and/or image recognition capabilities, which put them in a different league.

How a tool might work:

The photographer uploads photos privately to a new set on flickr.
The photographer goes to the tool, which authenticates them with flickr, using the existing API.
The photographer selects a set of of photos to operate on.
The photographer selects a list of subjects. The easiest way to do this is probably have a text field into which the photographer can cut and paste an email header, since every event in the known universe is organised by email these days.
The tool presents the photographer with a table of photos (which the tool can access because it is authenticated) and people / email addresses, the photographer checks checkboxes as to which people are in which photos.
The tool adds tags to each photo to indicate who is in which photo and their email address. Ideally the tags would be encrypted, so as not to make the email addresses open to spam and to avoid tempting yahoo! to do something we'd prefer it didn't.
The tool presents the photographer with an email for customisation. The email contains a thumbnail of each photo the subject is in, and a URL to block or approve the particular photo, as well as URLs to blanket-block and blanket-approve all photos. The instructions in the email make it clear that the subject should reply to the email either approving or rejecting the photos, either as a block or individually. The instructions also make it clear what happens in the event that the subject does not respond.
The tool sends out each of the emails.
Subjects receive the emails, indicate their preferences, and return them.
When the photographer receives an email back from the subject, they click on the appropriate URLs, which access the tool, which amends the previously added metadata on the pictures. If any pictures have been cleared by all required subjects, it is automatically made public.
Optionally the tool might include a tiding-up feature which allows the photographer to visit after some fixed period of time and automatically deals with photos still public, by permanently deleting them, removing all metadata except that they were blocked, etc.

Such tool could also be used to add rich metadata in some appropriate metadata format (Dublin Core or FOAF anyone?). Such metadata could be approved (or rejected) by participants at the same time as photos.

cheers stuart

An Interview with Rebecca Alm and Kathleen Heideman

mpasiewicz — Fri, 03 Nov 2006 09:15:23 -0600

In this 22 minute recording, we'll hear from the Minneapolis College of Art & Design's Rebecca Alm and Kathleen Heideman. Listen in as they share some thoughts on podcasting, data visualization, and much more.

Also of potential interest:

http://connect.educause.edu/blog/mpasiewicz/an_interview_with_paul_gandel/8437

http://matrix.msu.edu/
http://connect.educause.edu/blog/mpasiewicz/audio_annotation_tools/1664
http://connect.educause.edu/An_Interview_With_Jerry_Goldman

http://tinyurl.com/n6end

The success and failures of geotagging

StuartYeates — Thu, 19 Oct 2006 10:55:54 -0500

Pier and Church on Kos

Without a doubt, geotagging on sites such as flickr have been a huge success. Initially geotagging was done by hand, then with third party scripts, then with third party web 2.0 tools and then, once it had reached critical mass, flickr itself started to support it natively.

Geotagging, the act of adding geo-spatial references to photos, is however, in deep trouble, and as the numbers of geotagged photos now exceed five million, those deficiencies are starting to cause serious trouble. These problems are not new and librarians, surveyors and other workers-in-metadata may well recognise them as new incarnations of very old issues.

The first issue is semantic. Does the location refer to the location of the photographer or of the subject? While this may not seem important, a 300mm zoom can easily take pictures of mountains a hundred kilometers away, and then it is an issue.

The sceond issue is quality. Many flickr users do they best to geotag as accurately as possible, but are frequently limited by the resolution of the mapping systems they are using. Google maps and Yahoo maps have differing levels of coverage, and there are a number of instances in which a feature's location differs by several hundred meters between the two. Some users use automated GPS geotagging, which relies of the clock of the GPS unit and the camera being exactly synchronised, but results in very high-quality location information if they are. Other flickr users are less diligent, some merely drag all the photos they took while visiting a city over the city in a geotagging tool, often resulting in errors of tens of kilometers.

The third issue is infra-structural. Currently, all the mapping systems are country-oriented (presumably because the sources of satellite images and maps are country-oriented) which means that areas that don't fall into a country (or worse, fall into more than one...) suffer from various forms of brokenness. These areas include the arctic and antarctic, non-country territoties, war zones, mid-ocean areas and the like.

cheers, stuart

An Interview with MIT's Phil Long

mpasiewicz — Tue, 17 Oct 2006 19:44:39 -0500

The attached MP3 provides continuing coverage of a series of interviews conducted at the 2006 EDUCAUSE Annual Conference. Listen as Marilu Goodyear hosts a 30 minute interview with Phil Long, Senior Strategist for the Academic Computing Enterprise at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Among other things, they take on the issue of patents, discuss Ray Kurzweil's Law of Accelerating Returns, and tackle the prospects for continued research on learning space design.

Flickr to launch geotagging

StuartYeates — Tue, 29 Aug 2006 02:44:49 -0500

As a regular geotagger, I've just been invited to import my geotagged photos into the new flickr geotagging system. It's not live yet, so I can see what it looks like, but I can confirm that there's a privacy step, so you can make the geospatial information avaliable within the context of the flickr privacy framework.

We are not automatically importing existing geotagged photos into the new system since there are some privacy features we want people to be aware of. The location a photo was taken can be kept private, even if the photo itself is public. You can set a preference for the default location privacy and change it on a photo-by-photo or batch basis. Importing will respect whatever privacy setting you choose.

Reflections on a year of flickr

StuartYeates — Thu, 24 Aug 2006 04:25:23 -0500

Tree in the Thames
Originally uploaded by Stuart Yeates.

I've now been using the photo sharing website flickr for a little over a year, and since I must soon make the decision whether or not to renew my "pro" account, I've decided to review my time so far.

The core idea of flickr is that people upload photos, with a licence (ranging from "All rights reserved" to the most liberal Creative Commons licences). Various privacy settings allow restrictions on who may see photos. Once uploaded, there are a number of tools for titling, describing, tagging and grouping the photos. A system of groups allows people with a common interest to share experiences and photos and a system of "contacts" allows individuals to track each others photos.

An API (Application Programming Interface) lets third parties writing programs the work with flickr. This include fancy uploaders, geotaggers (which allow you to tag each photo with a map reference, semi-automatically), collage production, badge making, and even professional printing and archiving of the photos.

Most people seem to use flickr in three distinct
ways. Compulsive users seem to upload images about pretty much everything they do, continuously, often from their mobile phone. While this is probably great at capturing social history, unless you already know the person involved intimately it is unlikely to be of short-term interest. Holiday users take many photos of memorable events (parties, weddings and particularly holidays) and bulk-upload them afterwards. These can be great for checking out a holiday destination: when booking my up coming holiday to Kos in Greece I used these kinds of pictures to check out the destination. The metadata attached to these bulk uploads is often poor to middling, since most are tagged with tags that apply to the whole holiday. Regulars upload carefully curated photos (usually daily), which often have extensive descriptions and tagging. Commonly they have been digitally enhanced with photoshop. Regulars form the backbone of most groups.

Some people have complained that flickr is full of pornography, but I've certainly not found it to be. Not that I've particular gone looking. There are certainly a great many artistic nudes of pretty much every flavour imaginable.

I've found that flickr has greatly enhanced both the number and the quality of my photographs. I'm a member of a number of groups, focused primarily on places I've been and things I take photographs of. I've had a number of very useful suggestions about my photographs from people I've never met, including much better ideas for framing, shooting angles and post processing. I've also participated in the deleteme group, especially created as a forum for robust and unvarnished critical feedback, and withered before it.

Largely in light of my flickr activities I upgraded to a Konica Minolta DiMAGE Z6, which has substantially greater creative freedom (and zoom) than my previous camera. I am currently contemplating a further upgrade to a digital SLR. The primary new facilities I'm looking for are polarising filters, bounce flash and very long night exposures.

I've done quite a bit of geotagging of my photos, and while I'd ideally like to get an NMEA capable camera such as the Nikon d200 which can record the location of every photo right in the EXIF data of every image, any camera with a decent clock (i.e. all reputable digital cameras) can be used in conjunction with a GPS logger to infer the information using post-processing.

Flickr does have limitations with respect to the viewing of photos. Unlike other systems it always presents images at a fixed range of sizes, on a white background with standard web page dressing and creates square icons of them, cropping potentially important features. The slide shows have a similar (but different) set of limitations. I personally don't find this to be a problem, but plenty of people (mainly those into photography apparently for the pure art side of things) seem to. The flick ideas forum has a pretty compressive list of features which people think are lacking.

flickr sells itself as a photo website, and host of web graphics and icons for the sole purpose of using them to build your own site is will get you kicked off. The key problem is that web graphics and icons are loaded every time any web page on the foreign site is visited, resulting in huge traffic, but not web page hits to flickr. Linking to your photos from your blog is, of course, fine and there are several tools, both built in and third party to help you do this. This blog entry was created using one, in fact.

One on-going problem with flickr is that many users upload images they do not have copyright to. As far as I can tell, this is no more of a problem with flickr than with any other photo sites, and possibly less.

So am I going to pay my renewal? In a flash!

flickr is not the only photo sharing website, but the only one I have used extensively and the only one I have a paid account with. For a full list check out Wikipedia's photo sharing category.

Sorry about the bug

StuartYeates — Thu, 24 Aug 2006 05:28:12 -0500

Sorry if any of you witnessed the technical difficulties I was having earlier with my blog. There was mis-behaviour in the link between my flickr account and my connect.educause.edu account.

The bug is described here, and was compounded by a bug in Firefox which caused it to crash when trying to edit the source of the bad HTML (but not the WYSIWYG, strangely enough).

Unfortunately the specification of body of blog messages and RSS messages is notoriously under-specified (or implemented poorly, which has the same effect), make bugs like this not obviously the responsibility of any party and thus much harder to fix.