FLICKR 2: Tagging, community, utility

What you can do with Flickr:
Post photos
Tag photos
Group photos into “folders” (I’m fuzzy on this)
Make photos private or public, or somethwere in-between.
Manipulate photos with applications
Add notes to spots on photos (very cool)
Search the tags!

Not having posted photos, I’m having difficulty understanding how “community” develops on Flickr. I can understand that if I use a particular tag, and discover another person who uses that tag, then our photos will appear when the tag is searched. How this creates community is not apparent to me, unless community is meant very superficially.

OTOH, having this rich resource of photos at the click of a mouse is a cool thing. Do any of you folks remember when we had as part of the reference collection catalogs of portraits or photos that could be ordered? They were limited, of course, and were essentially thumbnails. We’ve also had other picture collections in loose-leaf for those who needed a portrait of, say, Marie Curie. These could be photocopied—letter size portraits, usually. But they were horrible to keep in order, just like the Facts-on-File binders—only worse!

With Flickr, you can probably find a photo on just about any subject (including many of those portraits) and then use it for your nonprofit work. So much easier. But the “all rights reserved” part is confusing. For example, I just searched Marlene Dietrich and found several photos—identical—that were recently uploaded by different people, and all rights were reserved. How is this possible? These individuals must have found the photos elsewhere and put them online, perhaps with some tweaking for clarity (especially for the one for St. Therese). The subjects of these portraits have been deceased for decades.

For the previous “thing” I wrote about searching for library cats on Flickr. Lots of chuckles. The ability to find amusing photos for a pick-me-up, or a semi-homemade greeting card is a cool thing about Flikr that I really appreciate.