Saturday, May 5, 2007

Photos and Images - Week 5

From reading the tour about Flikr I found it interesting how much people are doing with pictures online today. I think about the photography classes that I took in college, and think that things are moving so fast now with technology. The ability to share photos with friends and family, and make photo books or calendars with pictures from your own or other friends' images is a great idea. Mediazine has a great tutorial online about this product. The only set back to this account is that one needs to create yet another account, this time with yahoo, in order to create the Flikr account. When looking at the tags used on Flikr, I noted that the tags used in the last 24 hours are terms that may not be included in the “most popular tags” area. I think it is a great way to see what others are adding recently that may be of interest but not popular across the board. It seems that Flikr is not just a passing fad with all of the extra 3rd party services being created for use with Flikr.

Exercise 1:
I looked through several photos from the “interesting – last 7 days” link. I found that most photos listed were of portraits or nature. I liked the photo of sunlight glinting through a tree’s branches. It reminds me of walking through the forest and taking time to notice the beauty of one’s surroundings. The same person took some similar photos that I saw in the “set”, and they were all just as beautiful.

Image Link: http://www.flickr.com/photos/67513240@N00/924660839/

More Flikr – Mash-ups and 3rd party sites

I liked the tool called “Trip Planner”. I explored the trips that have already been planned on the site. There is a map with image bundle links that tell you where the images are from when you hover over the icon. Below the map are images of the places listed on the map, making it a handy way to pick a trip by the images you enjoyed. You can open the link from the above icon pop up box and view the rest of the images associated with the trip.

API’s listed on class page:
Mappr is a cool tool allowing people to map images. I clicked on the map in the general vicinity of Missouri and images for Route 66 appeared. Mappr bases the location validity from the tags used by the person adding the images to the map.

Flikr Color Pickr was another tool that gave me some interesting results in searching the color chart. This is just what Mike W. ordered for cataloging the collection. Maybe the creator of this product has dreamed of a catalog run by colors too. I digress…. I did find a wonderful picture of a dragon fly wing that was taken very close up, and it was beautiful. As another writer so aptly put “like a stained glass window”. http://www.flickr.com/photos/50835495@N00/33591981/in/pool-colorfields/

Montager was not as fruitful as I thought it would be when I started using the search bar. I found that the searches retrieved 500 images, but only gave me an image at a time on the screen. It was more cumbersome to use then the benefits of finding images.

1 comment:

Robin said...

LOL - I never thought of using the Color Pickr for cataloging the collection. You should get right on that, Natasha!
There are a lot of really cool things that folks (libraries included) are doing with flickr. One of them, something we are involved in, is a 365 days project. We are going to upload 365 pictures to the Flickr account, detailing a year in the life of the library. I'm a bit behind on the pics, but once I get caught up, it will be a really cool scrapbook of a year of programs, events and other happenings at MRRL.