Tag: flickr

File this under the heading – there is no way to avoid all problems in the real world.

I have been doing some exploration for a piece I am writing on educational uses of the social image sharing site – Flickr. Somehow, in this process, I began investigating a project that had students submit pictures they had taken that showed angles. As I scanned through the collection of images, I encountered the picture of a nude woman. My first thought and I am guessing the reaction of some might be that this image had purposefully been tagged to shock others involved in the educational project. There was really nothing about the posture of this particular nude woman that seemed to fit the concept “angle” so the tag made no sense.

I investigated further and found that the Flickr site hosting the image offered artistic photographs – very few of which involved any nudity. I then took a look at the tags and description. Here is my guess based on the context – I think the photographer intended to use the tag “angel” and made a typing error.

I heard about adding geotags to Flickr images today and had to give it a try.

Examine this Flickr link

I apologize for the example – it was a picture that existed in my Flickr account from a recent trip and I knew exactly where the picture was taken. If you try the link, you will see me with a “trophy” fish. In the annotation associated with the picture, you will find a link (the geotag) that will take you to the map location of the lake where the fish was caught.

The page for generating the geotags can be located at http://www.beeloop.com/.

Now that we have learned how this works we intend to generate a Flickr account for Cindy’s trip to Europe and geotag some of her images.

With a little creativity, this capability would seem suited to lots of educational projects. Even the tool for linking to precise map locations can be used to generate the code necessary to embed a link to a specific location – e.g., my office (courtesy of BeeLoop SL – the Mapware & Mobility Solutions Company). My office is initially difficult to see – click the + button on the slider a few times and the building will become visible.

Tech Crunch description of new service

Tim Lauer’s blog contains a post describing a Flickr photoset display script called photoshow. A photo set is a subset of your flickr image collection that you have identified. The following link takes you to a demonstration of this script I have added to an independent web page (the script runs automatically when the page opens and I did not want the script to automatically activate when everyone connects to this blog).I don’t like the way the bottom of each picture seems to be cut off, but the script works well.

My Demo

Note: Clicking on an image from the set takes the viewer to the full size image and annotation within Flickr.

My demo and Tim Lauer’s demo stopped working this afternoon. Perhaps the Photoshow server was unable to handle the pressure of the interest generated by the new app. We will have to see if they are able to get their system working again (the message that follows was captured from my screen). I guess you should wait to try this until it is known if they can work out the bugs.

Why is this capability useful? It allows someone with a substantial number of Flickr images to identify those he/she would like others to view for a given purpose.