Flickr Thoughts

Two posts from the 2.0 work blog:

I've been using Flickr for quite a while. It all began when I attended my nephew's graduation party, and I was the one with a camera. I needed a way to share the photos with my family. A year or so ago, I hit the 200-photo mark. Once over the mark, flickr hides the oldest until you pay. I decided to pay.

Some of my co-workers started asking me about features I hadn't really explored, and I realized that even if comfortable with a web tool, there could be a lot of things I don't know because I haven't used them. I decided to explore some of the groups, adding yet another layer to the social networking possibilities that already make me feel overwhelmed. Serendipitously, someone commented on this photo:

asking if I would add it to his Paul Bunyan group. Incidentally, rather than use Flickr's "Blog This" button, I prefer to choose "All Sizes" and copy and paste the code for the size I wish to use in my blog, or copy the URL for the size I wish to use and use the picture upload button. Roller is not so flexible as Blogger for this, and Blogger is not the greatest either, I have to say. I searched around for a few more groups for which my photos might be appropriate. I added a few to Pictures of Maps, for which I got a thanks. I looked at the guy's profile, and realized I'm really only scratching the surface at flickr. He has or is in about a hundred public groups, and has 30 contacts. Contacts? So I need to find friends here too?

I like Animoto for creating short little videos of my photos from flickr. Now I've discovered if I click the Toggle HTML button in Roller, the thing won't mess up the code I'm trying to embed, so there should be an animoto photo show below. If not, you can see these familiar scenes to many of us by clicking here.

A park
Originally uploaded by nicholaswegener

With this stuff, web 2.0, even when you think you're familiar enough with something, you learn something else that's always been there, or something new comes along.

I've used Flickr a lot, but saw little use for the "Blog This" feature. I prefer to use the bells and whistles of the blogging tool. Some people working on this 2.0 activity have learned that you can't post a photo from Flickr with the URL of the photo. To get the URL that works, you have to be looking at one of the sizes of your own photo. You can't do that with someone else's photo. Ever. "Public" does not mean you can just grab the photo without attribution. Even under creative common license, you can't find that URL that will allow direct posting to your blog.

So the only way to post someone else's photo without the Flickr blogging feature is to save it to your computer, and then upload it to your own flickr or blog. And that, it seems to me, gets into murky copyright territory. It's safer, and certainly more courteous, to use the blogging tool that will give a direct link back to the original photographer.

So...I decided to wade into use of this tool. The photo above comes from a group I joined where you guess where the photo was taken in the Portland area.