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Words and pictures and storytelling

Jan 13th, 2010
by pollyalida.
8 comments

octopus' garden in the shade

I love words and pictures and storytelling. And I love playing with tools that help us tell our stories. So it’s no surprise that I’m having great fun playing with  Flickr Poet from Stories in Flight which I discovered last week from a colleague’s flickr stream. Pop in a poem, song lyrics or just random thoughts and see what you get!

Flickr poet pulls in photos from flickr that match your words in some way. Click on “Show Story” over and over to get different interpretations of your words. What a great way to enhance a poetry or storytelling project.

For a school project, it might be more interesting to have students pick out photos themselves and create their own presentations.

Tools to find photos

Finding photos is pretty easy, finding photos that are licensed for reuse under Creative Commons can be a bit more of a challenge. (more…)

Flickr’s “People in Photos” feature

Nov 5th, 2009
by pollyalida.
4 comments

flickr face featureA couple of weeks ago, flickr added an option to help identify people in your photos. On the right side of the photo page, right near where the Tags feature is, you’ll now find the “add a person” option. Click on that and just type in the person’s name or email address, matching flickr user names will appear. Sure, flickr users have often used names as regular tags to identify people, but it could be hard to figure out which name to use. For example, am I pollyalida? polly farrington? pollyalidafarrington?

What I didn’t notice till yesterday was the ability to outline the person’s face on the photo. Just click and drag a box around someone’s face and you get an option to add a note or a person’s name. Just like face tagging in Facebook.

Want to find all the photos of someone? Just substitute their username in this URL: http://www.flickr.com/people/username/photosof/

Don’t like the idea of people adding your name to photos? There’s an option for that in your Privacy Settings. You can prevent anyone from using the new “people tags”, but that doesn’t prevent someone from adding your name to the regular tags. So I guess some of the really awful pictures of me are out there to stay!

Galleries on Flickr

Sep 15th, 2009
by pollyalida.
2 comments

Flickr has a new galleries feature that lets you create sets of up to 18 photos around any idea, theme or concept you find interesting. This encourages you to explore other people’s photos and search beyond just your own contacts photos for interesting content.

My first thought was that it will help me organize some of the photos I’ve added to my favorites. I ‘fave’ lots of photos and then have trouble finding them again. Galleries might help with with this. (anyone else have great ways of organizing favorited photos?)

The limit of 18 photos encourages flickr members to act as “curators” and gather the best work representing a theme. Seems like a great presentation method for a school project.

Thanks to ShellyS for adding one of my photos to her Simply Awesome gallery or I might have missed this new feature!

Get more info from flickr galleries help.

flickr, National Library Week and New York libraries

Apr 11th, 2009
by pollyalida.
1 comment

Nioga (NY) Library System - Blogs & Flickr Class
flickr class at Nioga Library System, Lockport, NY

New York libraries – get out your cameras and take a shot at fame!  The New York Library Association is having a fun photo contest.  Visit the NLW – Library Snapshot New York State flickr group to learn more and submit your photos.

During National Library Week 2009 on the days of April 12 – 18, New York Librarians and Library Staff will take a range of photographs of libraians working, meeting, teaching, and other activities that librarians do in a given day.

We encourage you to be creative in taking photos that capture the essence of New York Librarianship. Winners will be picked for the following categories:

  • Librarians as Teachers and Trainers
  • Librarians as Trailblazers in New Technology
  • Most Humorous

Winners will be recognized on the NYLA website (www.nyla.org) and during the 2009 NYLA Annual Conference this October in Niagara Falls.

Each photo should also have the tag snapNY09. You may use any additional tags and titles and descriptions that relate to the photo.

Please visit NYLA Snapshot Contest for complete contest guidelines.

On Sharing Photos & My Not-So Clean Desk

Jan 2nd, 2009
by pollyalida.
No comments yet

clean desk Anyone who knows me, knows how much I love flickr. I love how shared photos & conversations around those photos help me connect with friends, family and colleagues. And how photos can bring to life, places I may never get to see in person.

And thanks to the generosity of people who share their photos via Creative Commons licensing, flickr is also a terrific source of images for livening up your blog, illustrating a school project or for use in presentations. Use flickr’s advanced search option to find Creative Commons licensed content.

Most of my own photos are licensed for use by anyone as long as it’s a non-commercial use and they give me credit. Like many other people, I set up a  search alert on Google that lets me know whenever it finds my flickr user name mentioned anywhere. It’s always interesting to see where a photo may end up. And sometimes rather funny.

The photo above, ended up on a blog posting encouraging people to bring a bit of order to their workday by clearing up some of the clutter on their desks. A laudable goal. One that I will now try to live up to. I’ve been clearing mountains of papers all week. I hope to see the surface of my desk soon.

With that goal in mind for the New Year, let me wish you all a happy, healthy and peaceful 2009.

Great flickr images about our online world, media, life

Oct 15th, 2008
by pollyalida.
2 comments

About a year ago Helene Blowers tipped her readers to a great set of flickr images – Lynetter’s Interesting Snippets. Lynetter takes quotes about the online world, media and communications and finds great images to illustrate them. (Creative Commons licensed of course.) I love these images and quotes and have used quite a few of these in presentations.

And I was excited to discover another terrific set of images recently – Digital Bites by Will Lion.  I hope both Lynetter and Will Lion continue to add to these wonderful sets. Thank you both!

Whether you’re doing presentations or not, these slides make for interesting and thought provoking viewing.

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