Thing 4_Flickr

Alas, my personal laptop is taking a spa vacation at the Best Buy service center, and I had a few crazy weeks between work and personal vacations, but I've returned and am excited to chatter about Flickr.

When I initially began exploring Flickr, Muriel (my laptop) was still here in Minneapolis, so I found and installed the bulk upload tool. Immediately, I upload my limit of 100mb photos for the month within 12 hours.

First, I love bulk upload tools - they allow for people to use the web as a convienent secondary storage device. If you're stuck uploading anything one item at a time, it's unlikely to be a time saver. I could see this being especially important for instutions that are looking to make a collection available to the public.

Next, the tags in Flickr are truly genius. After a few brief tag searches, I found this beautiful picture of the Como Botanical Garden:



The photographer Zak Metz, has a number of amazing images on his Flickr profile and thanks to a creative commons, I can share this image for the education purpose.

Also, I began tagging my own photos, which is really quite exciting for being able to personally share images with friends and family. Libraries could also make sure of this site for sharing visual collections, hosting photos for their website, posting photos and images regarding events.

I've also used Photobucket and tried out Picasa. My experience with Picasa was rather disconcerting. I downloaded the application to take advantage of the photo editing features and suddenly, the app was attempting to find and categorize every application on my work laptop. Unfortunately, I had thousands of images of physician credentialing documents and I could not find a way to STOP it, so I closed the program and uninstalled it immediately. So... I'm a little concerned about Picasa's overzealous nature, but I have several friends, including two semi-professional photographers, who use Google's program.