Thing 5. Flickr

ABOUT FLICKR

Flickr is a photo-sharing website that displays “openly licensed photos from around the world” (Creative Commons Aotearoa NZ). They currently host over 220 million photographs under various Creative Commons licenses.

THE FLICKR COMMONS

In 2008, Flickr teamed-up with the Library of Congress to build the Flickr Commons. Since then the partnership has expanded to incorporate other memory institutions such as the Powerhouse Museum, the National Library of Australia, the Australian War Memorial and many more. Together, their objectives are “to increase access to publicly-held photography collections; and provide a way for the general public to contribute information and knowledge” Source: Flickr.

Drawing upon the knowledge of the crowd, the Library of Congress are using Flickr to help identify unknown people and places from their image collections. They are also incorporating keywords and subject terms from user-assigned tags into their catalogue records to enhance discovery. Take a look at Mashable’s slideshow of the most popular photos from the Flickr Commons.

Admittedly, Flickr’s star has waned a little in recent times with the introduction of other photo-friendly platforms such as Tumblr, Instagram (recently acquired by Facebook) and Pinterest. If you’re interested, read this article by Mat Honan in Gizmodo.

ACTIVITY

1. Join Flickr http://www.flickr.com/

2. As a basic introduction, take the Flickr Tour

3. Take a look at the Flickr Commons.

4. Try uploading your own photos – this could be a picture taken on your phone, digital camera or by scanning an existing photo. Alternatively you can search for an image which has an open copyright licence and upload the image to your blog.

5. Write a blog post about Flickr and continue to comment on your colleague’s blogs.

For information about the different types of Creative Commons Copyright Licenses, watch this brief video by Creative Commons Aotearoa NZ.