Using Flickr to build relationships and promote your library

Michael Stephens' second step in creating a hyperlinked library is to incorporate Flickr images, so your library photos can be linked in to many Web 2.0 applications. It helps to have a ready pool of available images. Flickr is an excellent way to promote your library, to your stakeholders and the wider world.

At ECU, our marketing section has a photo library, but good library photos are pretty scarce. Also we don't have license approval for putting the ECU marketing photos on Flickr. So we are looking to build our own collection of photos to promote the library. We need to be mindful of going through all the correct protocols and gaining written permission, when photographing of students or staff.

We have started our ECU Flickr photo site and hope to integrate this with other Web 2.0 applications as we go along.

Video on Flickr

Flickr is moving into providing video content. Is it too little too late? YouTube already have the mass market here in partnership with Google. But will Flickr aim for the high quality end of the market?

Technology Review in Yahoo's photo-sharing site, Flickr, expands into video with new service, gives a potted history of the last few years of online video and Flickr's new venture.

Only Flickr's ''pro'' members will be allowed to upload video clips, but anyone will be able to watch them. So this should weed out the dross that appears in YouTube More about video on Flickr here.

This move makes sense as the influential Horizon Report 2008 lists grassroots video as being on the first adoption horizon of new media technolgies in the short term.

How to make a Flickr badge with your photos

You will see I have placed a Flickr badge in my Jay Gee blog down the right hand side. I’ve set it up to do a running display of my photos tagged with the tag “Western Australian Wildflowers”

If you want to do this it’s dead easy if you already have a group of your photos in Flickr.

Click on the bottom of my badge where it says “what is this?” and then click “make your own badge”. This it links you straight thru to the 5 step process in Flickr. There are two types of badge to choose from: HTML or Flash. Mine is a Flash badge. What you finally end up with is some HTML coding which you can add as an extra element to your blog. You just cut and paste this into the blog element template that allows HTML coding.

Some libraries are using this to advertise new books or databases.

Photos and images, Flickr

I uploaded a few images of my photos of birds (albatrosses) and put them on the Flickr site. I was all pretty easy, and Flickr has a link to Yahoo, so I was able to use my Yahoo login, which was great as I’m finding all these logins are getting hard to keep track of. This was all really cool and I realize now I could have done this ages ago. Instead I built my own site for my bird images.

The images are tagged “eculibraryweb”. You don’t have to do that in “quotes”. I then changed the tags and added some more information.

NOTE. Your account can take up to two weeks to review. This is so they check you out and make sure you are not uploading inappropriate images. Until you account is reviewed you will not pick up your images in a search by the tags.

I got a bit lost with Masups, but at least I understand now how they work. I tried Explore and then I also had a look at tags and how you can search the tags in Flickr. The bigger the tag the more images there are, for example WEDDINGS is extremely popular. I clicked on Spain and found some great photos there.

I noticed too that you can link from Flickr to del.icio.us. But in order to save an item, you need to have an account with del.icio.us.

I read this and then I went back and tagged my photos with “mappr”
If you're not sure that the places you take your photos are well-known enough to be caught in our recurring sweeps of Flickr's photo database, and you would like to ensure that your future photos are added to Mappr, tag them with "mappr" or "mappr:include" when you first import them into Flickr. We check these tags frequently, and automatically import any photos we find.