Flickr
From Bazaar Wiki
Type of application / System Requirements
Flickr is a free online photo management and sharing application, accessible through a web browser.
Purpose
The main goal of Flickr is to help people make their content available to the people who matter to them, whether they want to keep it private to share photos of their kids with their family or whether they want to show off their best pictures to the whole world.
What it does
Photos and video can be put into and out of the system in a lot of different ways: from the web, from mobile devices, from the users' home computers and from whatever software people are using to manage their content. The content can be pushed out in a lot of different ways too: on the Flickr website, in RSS feeds, by email and by posting to outside blogs. Flickr wants to enable new ways of organizing photos and video. Flickr make the process of organizing photos or videos collaborative too. You can give your friends, family, fellow students, colleagues and other contacts permission to organize your content - not just to add comments, but also notes and tags. All this (added) info accretes as metadata, which makes it searchable later on.
How can it be used for creation of OERs
Although Flickr is not really meant to create a complete learning module with, you can create collections of photos and small videos with a certain theme by way of supplement to a learning module. Flickr can thus be used as part of or in addition to Open Educational Resources (OERs). Since you can create groups for sharing photos and videos, you can work very well in a student workgroup with Flickr, especially when you are creating a learning module for students who are focusing on visual content, e.g. art students and the like. In a group, which is very easily established, collections, sets, notes and tags can be used to organize the photos and videos of the whole group in a collaborative way. Students can comment on the work uploaded of their fellow students by way of notes, teachers can upload examples of their own work and point to work of others all over the world if this is licensed appropriately to underline the theme in their lectures. Notes allow your contacts (students or members of your group) to leave messages directly on your photos and videos (when you mouse over the image) and comments allow for a more general discussion below the image. Groups can either be public, public (invite only), or completely private. Every group has a pool for sharing photos and videos and a discussion board for talking. Flickr is more about photos then about videos though. Video on Flickr grew, as they say it so nicely themselves, out of the idea of “long photos” and as such, they have set a time limit of 90 seconds. So, if you want to give complete lectures by video, Flickr is not your kind of tool. Besides, only pro members can upload video content, and if you have a free basic account, you can’t upload videos. But anyone can view the video content which is there. Flickr can also be used differently.
In one of the Show-me days which were organized by the University of Cologne, one of the partners of the Bazaar project, we set up a hands on lab through the content creation cycle of searching for and making use of Open Source Software (O.S.S.) content and tools on the internet. Flickr was used to find Creative Commons (CC) licensed images and re-use them legally in a new OpenOffice document, together with found CC licensed text using the Google search engine and found additional text on Wikipedia and re-use this too. Your students don’t necessarily have to go the Flickr website to see the photos or the sets you want them to see or work with. You can also show the sets you select on your own (university or projects) website. To make the Flickr photos available on an external website, follow the step-by-step process to build a badge to show Flickr photos (HTML or Flash) and copy and paste the code Flickr gives you into your own site. On the Bazaar project website we show a badge like this on the right side of the screen.
Next to that we wanted to have a real Bazaar Photo Gallery, so visitors would not be transferred to the Flickr Photostream when they were looking for a picture connected to the Bazaar project. We preferred that they would stay in the Bazaar website. Besides, we liked it to continue to be automatically generated and updated when new pictures would be uploaded on Flickr with “Bazaar” tagged to them. For this, RayCom, one of the partners of the Bazaar project, wrote a piece of code. The Bazaar photos, taken during the lifetime of the project, are now shown in our own style of the Bazaar website.
Bazaar Photo Gallery:
With the Flickrslidr you can embed Flickr slide shows (which are created automatically of your photos when you upload them) on your own website or blog, see: http://flickrslidr.com/
How can it be used for consumption of OERs
As mentioned above, you can create collections and sets of photos (or short videos) in a certain group (of students). Group members don’t necessarily have to have their own account. You can give out guest passes to others (your students for instance). There is a Guest Pass feature to grant people who don’t have a Flickr account special. You’re able to expire the passes whenever you like. With an rss feed you and your students can subscribe to new uploads from the members of the group, thus activity can be monitored and stimulated by the teacher as well as the student. You can set up a Flickr account especially for the course you give to your students or you can use your own (private) Flickr account. On Flickr it is easy to control who you share your images with. For each of your photos and videos on Flickr you can set the privacy level, the usage license, the content type and the safety level. For all your sets and collections you can set these levels differently.
How can it be used for reuse of OERs
Existing collections or sets of photos can be reused and edited as long as the person who uploaded them keeps them on Flickr. When the uploader is using a free account and is not being active over a period of 90 consecutive days, the account will be deleted. This is not the case with a pro account.
License support
Flickr has a built-in support for Creative Commons (CC) licensing. See for CC their website at: http://creativecommons.org/. CC provides free tools that let authors, scientists, artists, and educators easily mark their creative work with the freedoms they want it to carry. You can use CC to change your copyright terms from "All Rights Reserved" to "Some Rights Reserved." When you click on “Some rights reserved” you can see that others are allowed to use your photo under the conditions you have set (attribution only, or a combination of licenses). When you just upload your photos without a set license, the photo will be automatically All Rights Reserved.
Flickr Creative Commons Licensing:
Creative Commons licenses:
- Attribution License
- Attribution-NoDerivs License
- Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License
- Attribution-NonCommercial License
- Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License
- Attribution-ShareAlike License
For the Bazaar project we created the Bazaar Pins: a set of pins with the Creative Commons pictograms and the logos for Bazaar logo and our podcast Sounds of the Bazaar. To stimulate the sharing and reuse of content, the Bazaar project supports Creative Commons and came up with the idea to wear pins to Show that we Share to conferences, seminars, our Show-me days and every other (non-)Bazaar event. Pinning the ones we consider important on our rug sacks and jackets makes showing that we share an everyday thing.
Bazaar Pins:
Standards / Compatibility
Flickr has an API which can be used for remote procedure calls. Flickr supports JPEGs, non-animated GIFs, and PNGs. You can also upload TIFFs and some other file types, but they will automatically be converted to and stored in JPEG format. As you publish photos, they're compressed and resized by Flickr (if necessary) in several sizes, including the original size if you have a pro account.
HOW TO USE IT
First you have to set up an account. For a nice and easy guideline of how to use Flickr from there, take The Tour and let them explain about how to upload, edit organize and share and the like. The Tour: http://www.flickr.com/tour/
To upload your photo's you can use special tools which you can download for free from Flickr. Download here: http://www.flickr.com/tools/uploadr/ Flickr Uploadr 3.0.5 (for Windows Vista & XP, Mac OS X 10.5 & 10.4) is the most recent of these uploaders. Other uploaders: iPhoto plugin for Mac OS X. Download here: http://www.dustin.li/Publish/Software/Entries/2007/12/26_Free_Flickr_eXport_iPhoto_Plugin.html and jUploadr for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows. jUploadr is considered to be a cross platform Flickr uploader. It currently runs on Windows Linux and OS X. It allows you to set all properties of a photo before you upload it to Flickr. It also supports batch editing. Download jUploadr here: http://juploadr.org/. And finally, you can also upload your photo's separately in the form on the Flickr page.
You can select very easily pictures from your computer and add titles descriptions etc and create a set where the photos should be in, see e.g. Bazaar meeting Dec 07. You can describe the upload very easy separately or with a batch operation for all pictures in the upload, add tags and descriptions. You can 'batch edit' the whole upload/ set and create Collections and Sets in the Organizr, or part of it with regard to titles, tags, and descriptions, permissions, licensing (Creative Commons), dates, rotation etc. Separate each tag with a space or to join two words together in one tag, use double quotes.
Batch editing:
You can check how your uploaded photo looks like when it is seen by others in your photostream on Flickr by simply clicking on your photo when you are batch organizing in the Organizr and click on 'Open photo page'. You will see all your settings (the Creative Commons licensing you added, the date which was set by you on which the picture was taken and the descriptions you gave them, if any). Assigning the right license to any of your photos or videos is an important action you can and should undertake while using Flickr. If you have made your photos public anyone can see them and use them. But it depends on which Creative Commons license (CC) you give them, in what way your pictures can be used by others.
Flickr is partnered up with Picnik, see: http://www.picnik.com. With Picnik you can edit your uploaded photos.
Links / examples / Who is using it
- Flickr: http://www.flickr.com
- Moo: http://www.moo.com - here you can make minicards (or business cards) from your Flickr photos, which you can fill randomly, or select. A lot of bloggers/ Flickr users make the minicards with their (or a selection) Flickr images on it and their names, company and e-mail on the back.
- http://www.flickr.com/guidelines.gne - see here the Flickr community guidelines
- http://www.flickr.com/services/ - Flickr has an open API. Anyone can write their own program to present public Flickr data in the ways they like. Here you can find several very interesting Flickr Applications developed by outside developers
- e.g. Kubrickr (http://redalt.com/Tools/Kubrickr ) (a tool that lets you replace the blue blob at the top of a WordPress blog by a photo from Flickr)
- or Flock (http://www.flock.com/) (a new web browser with built-in Flickr uploading and other extra Flickr features built right in) and more.
- http://www.flickr.com/creativecommons/ - an explanation of the Creative Commons licensing and a list of so licensed photos on Flickr.
- Embed Flickr slideshow: http://flickrslidr.com/
Sandbox
Set up an account by going to: Flickr Click right on “Create Your Account” and go to “Sign up”. A Free Account gives you the following: 100 MB monthly upload limit (10MB per photo), 3 sets, Photostream views limited to the 200 most recent images, and the possibility of posting any of your photos in up to 10 group pools. A Pro Account costs roughly 25 dollars and gives you: unlimited uploads, storage, sets, collections, access, stats, ad-free browsing and sharing, and videos upload.
Comments / Discussion
I like Flickr because Flickr stimulates interactiveness. The Flickr design is no nonsense but nice at the same time. Not so ‘rough looking’ as some other tools from our sandbox are. A slideshow from Flickr can be used immediately in a presentation when there is internet connection, it doesn’t need modification first. Next to this with the Flickr Uploadr (but also without it) the uploading procedure is very simple, you can keep your collections as private or public as you like and a CC license is easily applied.
