http://www.flickr.com/photos/withayou/3006459630Uploaded on November 5, 2008by withayou
http://www.flickr.com/photos/brianglanz/2555770034/ This photo was originally titled "Thieves Lair, 2004" Uploaded on June 6, 2008 by brian glanzI am torn about flicker. I really like that there are so many photos to choose from. However, I found it difficult to find pictures that matched my theme of "presidential election". I found that I had to spend over an hour just to find pictures that were relevant. If I typed in presidential election, then I got pages of elections from all over the world. When I narrowed the search I found that if I changed the tag even slightly a whole new set of pictures would come up. In addition, when I tried to copy the pictures to my blog I found that the directions we were given were not always presented in that format on the website. This made the task even more difficult. I wish that flicker had a more uniformed layout. It was not user friendly.
I am not saying that I will never use it, but I found that simply googling images is much easier and yields better results.
Todd,
ReplyDeleteAs the facilitator of the course, if the directions on the wiki for copying the pictures into your blog weren't clear, could you please email me and let me know what you found confusing? It's my responsibility to make sure that they're as clear as they can be, so I'd like to improve them if they weren't.
As for searching in Flickr, it takes a bit of getting used to. Depending on your search terms, you're going to get vastly different results. I find that I swap between searching Flickr "full text" and tags themselves.
I tried your same words "presidential election" without quotes under the general creative commons search and received just over 7,000 results. Yes, I did receive pictures from elections all over the world. Then I refined my search by adding Obama and it dropped down to just over 3,000. Keeping in mind that many people will "squish" their tags and descriptions together instead of separating them, I then searched for Obama2008 and received just over 1,800 hits, which seemed to give me much better picture results.
Here are the searches I did, the number of hits I received, and the link to the search results:
Obama2008
Search result: http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=obama2008&l=cc
Obama inauguration
Over 21,000 hits: http://www.flickr.com/search/?l=cc&w=all&q=obama+inauguration&m=text
Obama campaign
Over 9,000 hits :http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=obama+campaign&l=cc
Obama campaign 2008
Over 5,000 hits :http://www.flickr.com/search/?l=cc&w=all&q=obama+campaign+2008&m=text
Simply Googling images is certainly easier and can yield better results, especially for politically oriented photos, but they aren't creative commons licensed, which means we have to be very careful about using and re-publishing them. By searching creative commons licensed media, we're giving both ourselves and our students media they can freely use and publish on the web.