Playing With Photo Sharing Tools-Part 1

Photo by Eli Nixon via Flickr

I love to take pictures and I have high hopes for myself when it comes to what to do with them. I see photos as a way to save and share life's best moments.  I love scrapbooks and  have even taken scrap booking classes. I have hundreds of dollars of scrap booking tools in my basement.  But, the truth is...I am terrible at following through with photos.  My photos are in large boxes in various closets around the house. I have completed exactly one scrapbook page with my hundreds of dollars worth of tools and I very seldom even have a picture of my family in my wallet to share with friends.  And, I must also admit that  I still sometimes find rolls of undeveloped film in drawers while cleaning.  (I have not owned a camera that takes "real" film for at least 5 years....) 

Photo Sharing tools started out the same way for me.  I did not really see the point.  I had an iPhoto account and could keep all of my photos there. They are about as organized as my boxes of print photos,  but with time, I can find what I need.  This summer, I decided it was time to open a Flickr account. My friend had one and she made some pretty cool things.  She had participated in the Flickr 365 project last year and was proud of the photos she had collected. I was pretty impressed with the variety of photos she had collected and the ways that her photos told stories in the monthly mosaics she created.  I started to read about the ways taking 365 photos a year had impacted others too. 

So I joined Flickr this summer.  I opened an account and waited. But I quickly found  that I began to live my life differently. I carried my camera with me and was constantly on the lookout for a good photo opportunity. I used the account for photos with personal use, not professional, and I quickly found out how much easier and more fun it was to share photos.  

Because I logged onto Flickr more often to download photos, I found myself exploring the site a bit.  I learned to make sets of pictures and to tag favorites from others. I learned that almost any photo I needed for a presentation or project could be found on Flickr.  I created a Mosaic of pictures using Big Huge Labs with friends who had been on a trip with me. I used iMovie to create a birthday card with other photos I had collected. And I created the best Keynote presentations I had ever created because of the photos I found on Flickr.

And then, when I attended November Learning, I learned about the fun of Flickr Groups.  A group was set up for others who had attended BLC 10 and we could all add our photos to the group's page.  It was fun to see others photos of the event and fun to add my own.  I connected with a few of the speakers through the photos that I posted. 

I became fascinated by the concept of groups and found that there are more groups than I could have imagined. Groups of cookie bakers and cupcake eaters.  Groups of librarians and accountants. 

  

The summer was a great time to play with and learn the basics of Flickr.  I had the extra time to play and have fun with it and I was out and about enough to have some photos worth sharing. For me personally, Flickr has helped me become the kind of person who takes and shares pictures that I have always wanted to be . I can quickly and easily download photos to flickr and put them into a set or collection.  I am able to organize them and share them quickly and easily.  From a professional standpoint, Flickr has really given me a new way to think about my own presentations and projects.

I know that there is more that I can do with photo sharing sites but this personal learning has been a great start for me.   I feel that my learning about Flickr has opened up so many realistic possibilities for me when it comes to photos. Although I may still come across a roll of undeveloped film in a drawer, here or there, I won't be adding any new rolls to the collection.