Flickr (better than Twitter)

Thank you Girl in the Moon

Flickr. I love beautiful images, so I am excited about looking at Flickr, which I can't say I had ever done before. I'm very used to uploading my own images onto facebook and had assumed this was something very similar. The main difference which strikes me however, is the difference in audience. On facebook, I upload photos which I hope my 'friends' are going to enjoy. Usually they are pictures of me or of mutual friends. I sometimes include pictures of 'things' (eg. some pretty flowers or a famous landmark), which help to give some context to the album, but generally I know people aren't going to be interested in them. I use facebook photos to keep people up to date with my life and family, so moreabstract images are not going to be used. But Flickr is about sharing absolutely anything with a much larger audience - the interests of which are going to me much more varied - in fact, the one thing they probably won't be interested in is me!

A lot of the images I've looked at on Flickr have been beautiful. However, limiting searches to Creative Commons only, does seem to take a lot of the nice ones away in some of my searches. For example, my hometown of Ulverston was magically transformed into the most delightful place imaginable when I first searched, but adding the Creative Commons limitation, suddenly made it look much more familiar. Searching under 'violin' however, didn't seem to make too much difference. There were still some good crisp arty shots which I thought very stylish. The difference between searching under tags and under full text also brings up different results. For my violin example, the full text certainly seemed more helpful for what I had in mind.

'Violin' search under full text and all images

'Violin' search under full text and Creative Commons

'Violin' search under tags and Creative Commons

Flickr seems to be a good tool for finding images which are definitely free for use by searching under the Creative Commons. Librarywanderer has commented on the fact that as a tool for actually finding images, Google images is actually preferable. I would certainly agree that Google does seem to perform better when it comes to finding exactly what I'm looking for, just under one keyword. My violin search yielded the following result on Google which even a brief glance of the screenshot below will show you that basic, literal violins feature much more prominently.

Google images results for 'violin'

There are some beautiful and useful images out there on Flickr and I'm glad I've finally got round to using it.

By the way, the lovely water droplet picture was courtesy of Tanya Puntii on Flickr. However, I have been having problems adding any kind of captions to my images despite a thorough search on Google and Blogger Help for an answer. Does anyone know how to do this, and also how to add nice tidy borders to images such as appear on everyone else's Cam23 blogs?