Week 3, Part 1: Little flickrs of light....

Sorry. Today must be pun wednesday.


This week's post is all about image sharing. There is also a video-sharing component to this module, but I'm going to write that up in a separate post so I don't get all inarticulate and confusing.

Like every great procrastinator, I've always been a big YouTube fan, but thought Flickr was only useful to soccer moms from Utah with ginormously fancy SLR cameras who also enjoyed elaborately decorating cakes and then taking pictures of their elaborately decorated cakes with their fancy SLR cameras. And maybe I still think that, a little bit. But even if Flickr is mostly populated by the destination-wedding crowd, the concept behind it is really, really great.


Flickr is a non-profit, photo-sharing community, based primarily on types of distribution licences used by Creative Commons. Basically, users can upload their content, then state what type of distribution/reproduction license they give to other users who find their work and want to modify, use or redistribute it (for example, an attribution license, which allows users of an image to modify, reproduce or distribute an image provided they give the original author of the image credit). Flickr also allows users to restrict who can view their images -for example contacts, friends or family members.


What's Awesome About Flickr


Flickr has some really amazing features. First and foremost, it allows for the non-profit, open-source sharing of visual material. In the internet age, this may seem like a really obvious, unexciting thing, but basically Flickr built on the idea that people should be allowed to distribute and share pictures. It's a facility where people can share their photography (both personal and artistic) and other art with networks wider than Facebook or other social networks, by creating photo albums, collections or art portfolios. Even free accounts have heaps of storage space, pretty decent image editing tools, comment facilities and even geo-tagging - allowing users to tag the place where pictures were taken on a map. These are all awesome features for travellers, photografiles, cloud-spotters etc.


What's Not Awesome About Flickr


While Flickr is definitely awesome, there are a number of usability and other issues which make it slightly annoying. Firstly, the way you save and organise images is not super user-friendly, at least for this bird of little brain. Photos can be organised by sets, albums, and tags, as well as appearing in feeds, favourites and "galleries" - a system confusingly similar to favourites. Being able to organise your material is useful, but having so many organisation systems so confusingly laid out is just confusing.

Secondly, while Flickr has the potential to be an awesome art-sharing community, in reality it's mostly just a place where people upload their wedding photos/graduation photos/holiday photos etc so they can bore an even wider audience with unwanted minutiae detail about their lives. Cynical, perhaps.

Finally, while Flickr claims to be an open-source-type community, it creates (like Facebook image hosting) a whole bunch of copyright grey areas. While using Creative Common Licenses is a really good way to communicate to other web-users about how you feel about your creative work, there's an "all rights reserved" copyright option on Flickr (which is basically an assertion of ordinary intellectual property rights) - so basically you have a site set up for non-commercial, open-source image sharing where people can claim a proprietary interest in certain images. Confusing.

Having said all that, Flickr is still a great way to distribute visual information to a broad range of networks, without the expense and environmental degradation caused by printing, which is useful for both librarians and library-users. An example of this can be seen in Wellington City Libraries' Cuba St Memories Project, which uses a different open-source image sharing interface.

Here is my Flickr photostream. I haven't put that much up on it, because a) I don't have a camera at the moment and b) there is nearly always a hideously unphotogenic person behaving obnoxiously in photos, and that person is nearly always me.

NEXT POST: JUDGE JUDY MASHUPS WILL BLOW YOUR MIND!!! Alternative Title: How to Use Video Sharing Web Programmes.