Posts tagged Flickr
Flickr as a database?
Sep 6th
Nine Ladies stone circle, viewed from the King Stone
I went out on a photo trip yesterday. I’ve been testing the iPhone app GeoLogTag recently. For some reason I simply cannot get my iPhone talking to my MacBook, which makes a lot of the WiFi syncing apps a waste of time. GeoLogTag has an option to geotag photos on Flickr. If you visit this photo’s page on Flickr and look at the data on the right side, you’ll see it was taken near Stanton in Peak and there’s a map so you can see other nearby photos.
Once you’ve remembered to leave the phone on, which means cancelling the auto-lock, which geo-logging, then tagging is pretty much painless. The phone keeps track of where it is at any given time. It connects to Flickr and any ungeotagged photos that were taken while the phone was logging get tagged. This works because the photos have a record of the time they were taken. If you remember to take your phone around with you when to take a shot, then you can have a reasonably accurate log of where you are. At $5 it’s a lot more sane than buying one of those dedicated photo-loggers you can More >
Flickr: Tech Tuesday
May 26th
Various photos from my Flickr account.
Flickr is a deceptively simple website which I still don’t fully understand. The basic premise is simple; it’s a place where you can upload and display photos. It’s the few extras which massively increase its potential for serious projects.
After uploading a photo you have the options of giving it a title, a description and some tags. The tags can be used to look for similar photos. For example here’s the photos that I’ve tagged Segesta. However, because I’m uploading to the same database as thousands of other people I can also search for other photos people have tagged Segesta. Additionally I can also group my photos into sets. Here’s a set of photos from a trip to Hadrian’s Wall. For people who can’t get enough of cataloguing, you can also gather sets into collections. This is all done through a reasonably intuitive interface. It’s also easy to edit, so I could upload photos today and go back to improve descriptions and tags in a month’s time or more. For collating, cataloguing and storing your own photos it’s a handy tool but, like a lot of Web 2.0 sites, it’s the social tools that make it More >
Introducing Archaeopix Search
Apr 22nd
I’ve been quiet recently as I’ve been working on various things. One of them is now public and may be helpful to educators and bloggers. Tom Goskar and I have put together the site Archaeopix. The front of the site is a clear rip-off homage to Astronomy Picture of the Day. I like that. It’s an excuse to say “Hey look at this thing!” and generally be positive.
The clever bit is the search page.
Searching Flickr can be hit ‘n’ miss. Generally if you want to use a photo for a blog or educational handout and you need it quickly, it needs to be licensed under a creative commons licence. You can search on Flickr for cc-licensed photos, but a search for “Rome” will bring up everything with Rome in it. Groups are handy because they’re themed. So you could search the Archaeology group for Rome. The problem then is that you’ll find a lot of ©opyright photos. You really need a group which is all cc-licensed. Chiron is a good example of that. However Chiron’s strength is that it focuses on the classical world, which means you won’t find prehistoric Europe in it, or anything Mayan. This is where Archaeopix search comes in.
Using this you More >
Photos, Flickr, RSS and Cataloging
Aug 5th
Culture is not a Crime. Photo (cc) Dawn Endico.
Following the undocumented Technorati feeds, it seems that Flickr also has some useful undocumented feeds. If you want to pull out the latest photos tagged archaeology from Flickr it’s fairly simple, you can just go to the archaeology page and subscribe from there. However playing with the URL reveals that to pull the latest photos licenced under a Creative Commons licence you only need add the l attribute. So to get a tag type in:
http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?tags=tagname&format=rss&l=cc
This can be used to produce a Creative Commons Archaeology photo feed. To get photos for commercial use you simply change the l=cc to l=comm. This is how Unseen Treasures has suddenly started gaining photos along with blog post titles.
Potentially this is very useful at it provides an easy way to list recent CC photos in a easily manipulated manner. I’ve played around with Pipes to produce this reformatted feed with larger copies of the photos. This in turn can be fed into a copy of wordpress automatically, producing this site showing the latest photos. At the moment it’s not that much use, but in the future it may be. The next iteration of WordPress is scheduled to have tagging. If this is More >
