Organize - Sets and Collections
As an image collection grows, organization of the collection becomes more and more important. Flickr offers organizational opportunities in the form of sets and collections. Sets are nested within collections. For example, one might form a collection of personal images and a collection of “work” images within the same Flickr account. Nested within each collection would be multiple sets of images. If a physical metaphor would help, imagine a folder in which we save printed photographs (a set). Such folders might be kept in different boxes or drawers of your file cabinet (collections). Actually, individual images can simultaneously exist in several sets, an impossibility with physical objects, so it is not necessary to actually make a decision regarding where to assign an image. The following video describes how to create a Flickr set.
Why take the time to create sets?
Not all of our personal images have been organized into sets. We guess this is fairly typical. We take the time to organize certain images as a set when:
- we want to isolate the images for special attention, or
- when we have a purpose for sharing this set of images.
These two reasons are often interrelated. The long term goal of isolating a set of images for organization and modification activities may be to prepare the group of images for sharing.