Flickr Lesson

The photo here is from the Linn Christmas Parade 2006. Aren't the ladies from the Linn Book Club a fun, crazy bunch?

The Happy Bookers are wearing sumu suits that are Halloween costumes filled with air. The ladies carried signs saying "Celebrate Reading in a Big Way" or Giant-size picture books.

Wow! What a great lesson. This has been my favorite lesson so far. I was so interested in what flickr had to offer that I've already set-up my own free membership and uploaded photos Jan and I had at the library. Apparently, I went on quite awhile to Corey the first evening I got home after looking at flickr about all the options it would give us and how we could set up a group (private, invitation only) for Corey's family so we could share the photos we've all taken but never had printed and had copies made to share. Now we could post pictures from recent family events and all those photos of the cute nieces and the handsome little nephew.

I read through all the sections I could find and several FAQs to see how the privacy settings worked and printing photos from the web. I like the options of either having the photos mailed to me or picking them up at Target. It's also nice that I can choose a variety of sizes.

Then while searching through the photos others had posted I found a community theater flickr group with 43 members, where people can post photos of their group's recent productions. This gave me the idea of seeing if Osage Community Theater, Inc., should have it's own flickr account. Then I checked into the pro accounts and started emailing with Robin about the possibilities of having photos on flickr appear on the OCP, Inc. website that is hosted by her web design company. Check out www.ocpinc.org The annual meeting was coming up, so I decided to ask the board to have an account.

They approved this Saturday at the meeting. The board thought for $25 a year, why not give it a try and if we don't like it then the membership won't be renewed. I'm now looking forward to being able to post the 100 plus photos from the most recent OCP, Inc. productions to the group's flickr account. I've just started working on the account. Check it out at www.flickr.com/photos/ocpinc/

You can check out my public photos on my account at www.flickr.com/photos/parist/

Library Info: LaGrange Park Library's page gave good examples of sets: which are ways to organize your photos. Colorado College Tutt Library's page has photos which are a nice size and have titles and captions. The Library postcards page is an example of a group.

FLICKR PART 2

Tags are keywords used to search for photos. Groups can be set-up as either private (invitation only), public or people on your contact list.

Mash-ups and 3rd party sites: Mash-ups are websites or an application that combines contents from more than one source into an integrated experience. This includes web feeds such as RSS or Atom and JavaScript. APIs (application programming interfaces) are used to create mash-ups. Flickr has an open API, this means anyone can write their own program to present public Flickr data (photos, tags, profiles or groups) in new and different ways.

The example mash-ups were neat to look at though I couldn't do all of them from circ, but they all worked on my home computer.

I created a librarian trading card (see above) and it is posted on my flickr site as well as the librarian trading card group on flickr. I did mine from home, since I didn't have any photos here at the library and the circ computers have limited graphics. Since I was home, I ended up receiving some "technical help" from my resident gaming geek. He instantly recognized the card format as the Magik game cards. So, my card is set-up the way his older playing cards were designed and worded.