Flickr fun

I had created a Flickr account a few years ago after going to Europe. I'd planned to utilize the service by uploading my 4000 + photos that I took, but ended up uploading a good portion of them to Facebook instead. It's a lot of work to upload 4000+ photos and the task of having to do it again seemed daunting, so I never really looked at the site again until this week.

As a search tool, Flickr is really cool. I searched for my favorite spots in Louisville (Cherokee Park, Cumberland Brew Co, the various libraries ;), UofL, etc). I also searched for things that I reminisce about when it comes to my travels (my favorite results being Pizza Pot Pie in Chicago, Harry Potter in London [a popular location for that search was the Ledenhall Market, which was used in the films as Diagon Alley...I MUST go back to see this!], the Eiffel Tower in Paris, and tacos in San Diego...yes, I may have been hungry when I did my searching!). The photos that are geotagged on the site are really neat and lead to other things to search for. I am an addict when it comes to taking pictures, especially when I travel, so I could spend days just looking at pictures that others have taken.

The only photo sharing questions that I have gotten have been about uploading pictures to facebook, but Flickr could be a good reference tool if someone needs a photo of, say, a park in Louisville. For more localized photos Flickr would be great instead of searching for images on google or on one of our databases.

I uploaded a few pictures to Flickr and, though it tries to be, I don't find it very user-friendly. For example, I added my blog to it so I could just write this entry from the site and share my photos. I went to a few other places on the site and then I couldn't find my blog. I also made a map and geotagged some photos, but my photos did not show up on the world map, even when I adjusted my security settings and whatnot.

It's not very exciting, I have two pictures from Fairdale and one in Germany, but if you want to check it out, here is my map that I made.


http://www.flickr.com/photos/29342321@N02/map?&fLat=43.1267&fLon=-37.1017&zl=16&order_by=recent


Mobile uploading was kind of a pain...I guess since Flickr is owned by Yahoo! it doesn't offer an app for Android phones. If I wanted to share a picture from my phone, I would probably just upload it to Twitter, Picasa, or my blog because I already have apps that are much easier to use for that purpose. I've also had a photobucket account for years along with winkflash and snapfish. I don't actually order many prints, but I usually use these sites or even Walgreens.com because you can have them printed at your local Walgreens, pick them up within an hour, and not pay shipping. I use this service all the time for my mom because she always complains that I take so many pictures, but she doesn't ever see any. I just have them printed at the Walgreens in Etown and tell her to go pick them up.

I played with some of the sites built around Flickr. The spelling site was kind of neat, though I'd rather take my own photos for such projects. A photo project that I am working on right now is doing just that. I am meandering around Louisville taking photos of objects that make the letters in my last name. Big Huge Labs was fun to play on and had a lot of cool photo mashing tools that I'll definitely keep in mind for Teen Tech Week.

I enjoyed learning about Flickr, but I will definitely stay with Picasa because it is a program that I am used to and more familiar with. Plus, I use Google for just about everything else so it is already linked with my phone, e-mail, etc. I also feel that Picasa offers better photo-editing tools than Flickr did.