I skipped right to Flickr because I was comfortable starting with it, having been on its site several times.
Of course, I searched under "farms", got a bazillion images pulled up, all beautiful. Too many of course. So off to Advanced Search, which I found to be simple, if not simplified. I chose to limit the images to those with Creative Commons licenses. That brought the number down into the 200,000 range.
But the unfortunate part was that no image I saw contained any of the icons used by Creative Commons to indicate what type of CC license the image holds. I even clicked on a couple of images, and found no CC icons attached, so I don't know what to think of that. In my mind, that wasn't very useful if you were looking for an image to put onto a newsletter or something. And it isn't helpful for students who go to Flickr to find an image to put into a report, because, well, don't they come to believe that everything is copyright free? It's hard to explain fair use and education purpose and such to kids.
Which brought me to think, what is the current purpose of Flickr? As I understand it, originally it was a way for non-computer savvy people to post their personal photos onto the web so that their friends, and relatives, and others could see them, and they could manage/edit them more easily. An easier way than sending gobs of attachments in emails. Having a private group for this purpose appeals to me, but clearly a lot of people are putting a lot of photos out there on the web for anyone to see; their own reality show, perhaps.
Which leads to another question - has Flickr become image overload with all those free accounts uploading all those images every day, every year? Enter the tags to try to limit the number of results, up or down. But which tag works, which tag is the best choice? Which tag did that fabulous picture you saw last week, and want to see again this week, use? It can be a little much in terms of the amount of time one needs to find an image, imho.
This is obviously not Flickr's only use. I saw professional images as well. So it seems that Flickr has evolved into an additional tool for professional photographers - a digital portfolio and 'store'.
Final question - Is Flickr an appropriate portal to display library images, i.e. images gathered during library events (assuming those in the shot give permission), as a way to promote the library? Or has that purpose come and gone, replaced with Facebook pages or some other social networking site? I don't know that answer to this one.
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That's odd - I only use Flickr images with Creative Commons licenses, and I've always found the icons just below or to the right of the images, or a link that says "Some rights reserved" that you can click to find out which licenses it has.
ReplyDeleteI have found flickrCC to be the best way to search Flickr for images with Creative Commons licenses. Here is a blog post with more information about that.
Thanks for the link - I knew about it, but wanted to try out the Advanced Search.
ReplyDeleteI did go back and try it again, and yes, buried in TINY TINY print far down on a page, after you click on the image, is a CC icon. I think what should happen is that when you search for CC related images, the icon, and the specific type of CC license icon, should be right there, up front, available on the initial search results page, so that you are not wasting time with an image that doesn't carry the particular CC license you want.
In my opinion, having to click on the image, and then having to scroll down and click on the CC icon to find out exactly what is allowed is incredibly inefficient.