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Online Images with Flock and Flickr

by Doug Mills, CITES EdTech Consultant

In a recent EdTech Showcase article on Web 2.0, I described some of the possible educational uses of online image repositories such as Flickr. Among them I mentioned enabling student contributions, creating persistent URLs for multimedia, and taking advantage of extended resources. In this article I'd like to expand on those possibilities and also introduce a new web browser that facilitates the use of online images, as well as other Web 2.0 services. Flock is a cross-platform web browser built on the foundation of Firefox but designed to be Web 2.0 friendly with such features as a built-in blog editor, automatic sharing of bookmarks with a social bookmarking service, and, of particular interest in this article, a very nice interface with Flickr. Together Flock and Flickr now constitute my entire online digital image management strategy (as a Mac user, I use iPhoto for my off-line image management and basic editing needs; for Windows users we suggest Picasa for basic image management and editing).

So what's so great about Flock and Flickr? Let's begin with Flickr. At the most basic level, Flickr is a free online image management and sharing service where a registered user with a free account can upload up to 20 MBs of images to their account each month and share them with as many or as few people as they'd like. Being a Web 2.0 (or "Participatory Web") application, however, that's just the beginning. Users can "tag" their photos with descriptive labels that will aid in searches. So, for example, I've tagged the image below from my Flickr collection with the labels "dragonfly, red, odonata, blue-faced meadowhawk" ("odonata" is the name of the insect order which includes dragonflies, "blue-faced meadowhawk" is the common name for this dragonfly"). It is also possible for the user to add tags to other people's photos and vice versa - so, someone else viewing this photo may wish to add a tag like "black-spotted wings" or the scientific species name, "Sympetrum ambiguum."

Photo of a Dragonfly

Folks visiting this photo on my Flickr site are also able to: add comments (click on the picture to go to the site and see actual comments); choose to designate the photo as one of their favorites (essentially bookmarking it within Flickr to find again later); browse through my other photos either as a complete collection or as the subsets I've created; decide they like my photos and add me to their contact list (basically bookmarking me to find my site again as well as have a feed of my photos on their Flickr homepage); subscribe to an RSS feed from my Flickr site, which will be updated every time I add pictures; follow any of the tags I've associated with this picture to see all images I've tagged with the same tag, OR all images in Flickr tagged with the same tag (currently 1,691 photos in Flickr tagged as "odonata," for example); subscribe to an RSS feed of all images in Flickr tagged with a specific tag (such as "odonata"); and still more. Users can also annotate selected areas of images to call attention to details, etc., so that when another user mouses over the image, the selected areas are highlighted and the associated text appears (example).

As if that weren't enough, Flickr also allows the formation of "groups" based on common interests (believe it or not, searching for groups having to do with "dragonflies" in Flickr currently produces 374 results!) and/or agreed upon guidelines such as "123 groups" where members are required to post one image each day, give comments on two other images in the group pool each day, and view at least three images from the pool each day.  Groups can be public (anyone can join) or private (invitation only). Images are shared within a group via the group "pool," so as a member of the "1-2-3 Insects and spiders" group and the "Dragonflies" group, I can choose to share my "blue-faced meadowhawk" picture with either or both. Both of these groups are public, so anyone can browse the Dragonflies pool of photos, but only members can contribute photos or participate in the discussion boards there. There are also discussion boards associated with each group, in addition to the comments area connected to each image. Every image you view in Flickr also displays which groups (if any) it's associated with, so that's yet another way to discover groups of interest. Private groups, on the other hand, do not appear in any list and there is no way to access them apart from being a group member. The range of controls available to groups make them an interesting option for organizing a class presence in Flickr.

So where does Flock fit into the picture? Flock, as mentioned above, offers a number of Web 2.0-based enhancements to your browsing experience and there are versions for Windows, Macintosh, and Unix. I should say that technically Flock is still in version 0.7-something, so still in the process of development and occasionally there are minor irritations and inconveniences like sometimes needing to re-enter password information I entered before and told it to "remember." For me though, the pluses far outweigh the minuses and I enjoy using it especially for managing my work with online photos.  So what does Flock offer? The primary advantages of using Flock for your online photos revolve around its ability to integrate with your Flickr account (it also integrates with PhotoBucket, but I am not as impressed with PhotoBucket as I am with Flickr - your mileage may vary). If you have a Flickr account and you enter that information into your Flock "accounts and services" dialogue (under the File menu), then you're ready to enjoy the following enhancements:

  1. A "Photos" button on the Flock toolbar that opens the "photobar." The photobar displays the pictures available in your Flickr "photostream" or in the photostream of one of your Flickr contacts or any other Flickr user of your choosing. The arrows at each end of the bar enable scrolling through the available pictures on that account. Various other options allow you to choose images by user-defined sets or keywords. Clicking on any of these pictures takes you to that photo's page in Flickr.

    Flock photobar

  2. The ability to add any pictures from any photostream to your messages via drag and drop. When you hover your mouse over a photo in the photobar, two small icons appear representing small and large versions of the picture. Dragging either of these into an HTML-enabled web form, such as a discussion board posting in Illinois Compass, a document you're working on in Writely (which is how I created this document and how I added my dragonfly photo above),  or an email in your web-based email client (whether ExpressMail, GMail, etc.), adds the code necessary to embed that image in your message with a link back to the photo's page in your Flickr account.  Tasks like creating a Compass assessment with images become much simpler.
  3. The ability to upload images to your Flickr account via drag and drop. Clicking the "Uploader" button in the photobar opens a window that you can drag photos into directly from the collection on your computer (as a Mac user, what I love is being able to drag my photos onto that window directly from iPhoto). After adding optional titles, descriptions, and keywords for each photo, one button click uploads them to your Flickr account.

Reading about these features is not nearly so cool as doing it or seeing it demonstrated. You can try it out for yourself just by downloading Flock from Flock and, if you have not already done so, setting up a Flickr account at www.flickr.com. If you'd prefer to see these demonstrated, we'd be happy to meet with you, or we are presenting a Lunchtime Learning demonstration of this at noon on October 26th in 23 Illini Hall.