Thing 6: Discover Flickr Photos

Photo sharing websites have been around since the 90s, but it took a small startup site called Flickr to catapult the idea of “sharing” into a full blown online community. Within the past year, Flickr has become the fastest growing photo sharing site on the web and is known as one of the first websites to use keyword “tags” to help identify and search for photos. Tags also create associations and connections between photos and users of the site.

For this discovery exercise, you are asked to take a good look at Flickr and discover what this site has to offer. Find out how tags work, what groups are, and all the neat ways in which people and other colleges are using Flickr.


Discovery Resources:

• Flickr Learn More tour (6 steps)

• Mediamazine Flickr Tutorials

• Explore Flickr's Popular tags

• Interesting- Last 7 days

• Photos others have uploaded of our own Palos Verdes

• Check out these photos that have been uploaded of Marymount College Tarrytown
  

Discovery Activity:

In this discovery exercise, you have two options…

1. Take a good look around Flickr and discover an interesting image that you want to blog about. Be sure to include either a link to the image or, if you create a Flickr account, you can use Flickr's blogging tool to add the image in your post. Another option you have for including images in your post is to use Blogger's photo upload tool instead of Flickr's blogging tool. In Blogger, you have the option to link to an image or upload an image. So, you can either link to the photo URL in Flickr or you can download the Flickr photo into your computer's hard drive and then upload it into Blogger.
   
   -- OR --
   
   
2. If you're up to an easy challenge and have access to a digital camera ... create a Free account in Flickr and use the camera to capture a few pictures of Marymount. Upload these to your Flickr account and tag at least one of the images "MarymountCollegePV" and mark it public. (That way we can continue to add photos of the college after this program ends.) Then create a post in your blog about your photo and experience. Be sure to include the image in your post. Once you have a Flickr account, you have two options for doing this: through Flickr's blogging tool or using Blogger's photo upload feature.

So go ahead, explore the site and have some Flickr photo fun and if you're interested in looking at some other photo hosting sites, then why not check out Google's Picasa Web Albums (since you now already have a Google account) and this Wired story.

PS: A quick word about 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. Also, you might want to check out the Creative Commons licensing explanations in Flickr where you can search for photos by license type.


In case you are wondering about the photo at the top of this page...I took it while hiking The Mist Trail in Yosemite and saved it to my Flickr account.