Quite a few readers have been asking why Flickr not Picasa or Photobucket.  With any luck this last post in our Flickr series will help explain as I demonstrate some of the creative ways Flickr can be used.

Creating Cool Stuff From Your Flickr Photos

One of the best aspects of Flickr is they allow outside (“third party”) applications or websites to communicate and exchange information with Flickr.  This means you use public Flickr data like photos, video, tags in new and different ways plus easily search for creative commons images.

My favorite websites for creating cool stuff from Flickr Photos include:

1. Dumpr – check out this slideshow or my Dumpr flickr set to see what the images looked like before and after modifying using the different Dumpr tools
2. Big Huge Labs fd’s Flickr Toys – check out this slideshow or my fd’s flickr toy set to see what the images looked like before and after modifying using a few of the different fd’s flickr toy tools.  Note: Photobucket also links easily to fd’s Flickr Toys
3. Picnik – photo can be edited directly on Flickr using Picnik
4. Spell with Flickr – how cool is this writing with Flickr?
   

Using A Unique Tag To Bring Flickr Photos Together

A cool way to bring your photos or photos by a group of people together is to use a unique tag.

For more information on tags and tagging refer back to Quick Start Tips For New Flickr Users: Part I.

For example, by using the unique tag educhristmas08 educators shared photos of how Christmas and the holidays were celebrated in their part of the World which was then embedded as a SlideShow into a blog post.

Please Note:

1. There is a trick to embedding code into blog post so that it embeds properly and doesn’t cause problems in Internet Explorer.
2. Follow the same steps outlined for embedding videos when embedding any code into blog posts!

Locating Creative Commons Images

Flickr is a popular source for finding creative commons images due to:

• the quantity and quality of creative commons images hosted on Flickr
• “third party” websites that make searching Flickr images fast and easy

Popular tools for searching Flickr creative common images include:

1. Compfight
2. Behold
3. FlickrCC

Copyright and creative commons are important topics that you need to teach your students.  Here are some posts that may help:

1. Copyright and Using Images in Blog Posts
2. Finding and Adding Creative Commons Images To Your Blog Posts

FINAL THOUGHTS

Take the time to explore Flickr thoroughly for yourself because it has so many excellent features which I haven’t be able to cover.  If you are an experienced Flickr user – please let me know if I missed any important aspects.

The other posts from this series are:

• Quick Start Tips For New Flickr Users: Part I – setting up your account
  
• Quick Start Tips For New Flickr Users: Part II – using as part of your personal learning network (PLN)

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Hopefully our Quick Start Tips For New Flickr Users: Part I post helped you set up and start using your Flickr account.  Now its time to learn how you can use Flickr as part of building your your personal learning network (PLN) in this second post of our Flickr series.

Connecting With Others

An important aspect of Flickr that may new users don’t appreciate is it’s a great tool for increasing your relationship with people in your personal learning network (PLN). Experienced Flickr users often check out their friends’ latest photos and leave comments when photos grabs their attention.

It’s really not that much different from blogging except you’re using the visual medium. Still connecting by sharing information and interacting with comments with added benefit of easy tracking of friends’ photos through adding people as contact.

There are several options for finding your friends’ Flickr accounts including:

1. Bloggers often include a Flickr widget on their blog – clicking on the More Photo link opens up their Flickr account
2. Search Flickr members

Another great way of connecting with others is joining Flickr Groups. The 2009/365photo, where members share one photo per day for each day of the year, is an example of a group popular with educators.

Using RSS To Manage Your Flickr Account

The easiest way to check out your friends latest photos, monitor recent activities on your photos such as comments and track responses to comments you’ve left on other people’s photos is using RSS.

If you aren’t already using RSS to make your life easier make time to read this information and set up a Google Reader account! This way RSS brings latest updates from your Flickr account automatically into your Google Reader account.

You subscribe to your recent activities as shown in below. Remember to bring up the drop down arrow you hover your mouse over the icon (i.e. hover over You).

You follow the same process to subscribe to your contacts recent uploads except you click on the drop down arrow on Contacts and select Most Recent Uploads. NOTE: It only displays four uploads per day for each contact.

Organizing Your Photos

Using Sets and Collections is a great way of organizing your photos to make them easier for both you and your contacts to find.

Sets contain photos while Collections are used for grouping sets or collections together. For example, Pest, Predator, Disease Unit in my Flickr account is a collection which holds sets on aquaculture pest, predators and diseases such as this set of predator photos.

Free Flickr accounts have several restrictions including you can only create 3 sets, 100 MB monthly upload limit (10MB per photo) and views of your photos limited to the 200 most recent images. Paying US$24.95 a year to upgrade to a Pro Account is money well spent to get access to features like unlimited sets, storage and video uploads.

You organise your photos by clicking on the drop down arrow on Organize to create and add photos to sets, organise sets into collections, geotag photos, batch tag photos etc.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Are you convinced of the benefits of Flickr yet?  My final post on this Flickr series is about cool stuff you can do with Flickr photos.

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