I was really excited to see that online photo sharing was the topic for week 6 of the MLA's Web 2.0 CE course! Online photo sharing services, like flickr, are incredibly easy, convenient, and fun to use! I have had a flickr account since this fall, so I decided to upgrade to the flickr pro account. I'm excited about this, because there's unlimited uploads, storage, sets, and collections. There aren't any ads either.
To me, online photo sharing has many advantages. I like how there are ways you can control the privacy of your flickr account - I have the ability to make my photos viewable to anyone, flickr users, just my contacts, or only me. I also like how you can personalize photos into sets and collections, and assign them tags, titles, and descriptions. Before this week, I had never explored the Map feature of flickr, which allows you to geotag your photos to a specific place on a map. See what I've done so far here. On a personal level, flickr is great to use for photo sharing with friends and family members! It can take a lot of time to add titles, tags, and descriptions, but I love that flickr allows you to add some of these in batches to whole sets or colletions.
There are many library related uses for flickr. Flickr is a way to visually display library layouts, collections, displays, or special events. Digitization projects could also be displayed on flickr (see the Library of Congress' flickr photostream). The MSU Libraries has already utilized flickr in an awesome way! Angela Maycock, a Reference and Instruction Librarian here, put this wonderful flickr page together. I love how this photo tour not only shows the MSU Main Library's layout, but also describes some of the valuable features, resources and services we have to offer! This is a great way for people to become more familiar with the MSU Libraries!
It was a fun week! I should get back to adding titles, tags, and descriptions... I'll end this week's post with one photo from my Minneapolis Public Library (Central) flickr set.
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