Week 3: Sharing Images

There are a number of photo sharing communities online. These include Photobucket, Smugmug and Snapfish to name a few. In this lesson we will focus on the one which is perhaps the best known, Flickr.

Watch Online photosharing in plain English (from our friends at Commoncraft)

Flickr is a website that allows users to upload digital pictures from their computer and share them with just their friends or the whole entire planet. Users can “tag” an image with key words that describe the picture. This allows people to search Flickr for pictures that interest them by entering tag words into the search window.

Discover: Go to Flickr. Type State Library of NSW into the search box at the top of the screen and take a look at the pictures that have been tagged with State Library of NSW. What do you think about what you find? Please comment in your blog.

You have looked for some work stuff; now let’s look for fun stuff. How about trying the Sydney Festival? Also try looking for Matthew Flinders, lamington, vegemite – you get the idea, try some of your own key words (tags).

The National Library of Australia is using Flickr as a way of engaging people around the country in building the collection – see Our town example - scroll down to read the tagging guidelines. Look at the advanced search option of Picture Australia you can search for Flickr images here.

Look at Flickr’s 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.

This 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.

Creative Commons

How you would feel if someone took your photo and made a poster out of it and sold it? Not too happy we would guess, and rightfully so. To help protect the artist’s rights, Creative Commons was created to provide artists the ability to put work out into cyber space but still have control of how their work is consumed by the public. Here is more info about Creative Commons from Wikipedia.

Examples of websites that use Creative Commons to protect their work:

Public Library of Science – scroll to the very bottom of the page and click the "Creative Commons Attribution License" link to see how they use CC.

Flickr – look at this picture that we took. If you look to the right of the pic, under Additional Information, you will see two small icons and the link “some rights reserved”. Click the link to see how we used Creative Commons to both protect and share our work. We even put our picture on a map.

Learning 2.0
The original version of Learning 2.0 was created by the Public Library of Charlotte & Mecklenburg County. They licensed the course so that other libraries could use it. By agreeing to their licenses terms in Creative Commons, we also agree to allow others to use this content. We have permission to build on the work of Public Library of Charlotte & Mecklenburg County, King County Library System and Orange County Library Service . You can see our license on the right hand side of the screen.

Photo posting etiquette
When posting identifiable photos of other people (especially minors) is it advisable to 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 (as we have above in the case of cambodia4kidsorg).

Explore: have a good look around Flickr and discover an interesting image. Blog about it and be sure to include either a link to the image or a copy of the image itself in your blog posting. For the latter, you can either use Blogger's photo upload tool or Flickr's blogging tool (you'll need to set up a Flickr account for this).

Adventure: Take some digital pictures around the library, upload the pics to your Flickr account, tag with "slnsw2008" and share. Make sure the pictures are public, or we won’t be able to see them. Please respect the privacy of our clients - no pictures of kids or adult faces.

Note: for your images to be able to be searched by their tag (subject) you will need to upload five or more pictures.

Have a look at some pictures taken by our colleagues in King County when they did this exercise - click on photostream.

If you need a bit of help here is a video tutorial about Flickr.