Exploring Flickr

I decided to make the subject of my album Montreal. I visited the city several years ago and really enjoyed myself. It is a visually interesting city with lots of modern architecture blended in with the old city, which was first settled in 1642. Montreal is the second largest city in Canada, after Toronto, and is located on an island in the St. Lawrence River. The city got its name from Mount Royal, which rises 763 feet from the center of the island.

I began creating my album by searching for "Montreal" in Everybody's Uploads. I first noticed that nearly all of the photographs were professional quality. Some of the photos were of landmarks in the city, though others were studio portraits with no visible connection to the city. On the right hand side, I found the places category. In this section, you can search with in photos of Montreal. The first thing I could think of was "poutine" a local delicacy that I sampled on my first day. The search yielded many photos of the dish, which looks like its made of french fries, cheese curd and gravy, because it is. I also found pictures of Montreal's Latin Quarter by searching here. The photos in this section included many that looked like amature shots. I was really impressed with how well the pictures were tagged. Even when I chose photos that I thought might be mistagged, they weren't. I even tried a search using the word "gravy" just to see how a search that lacked a proper noun would work. Nearly every picture featured food with brown or tan gravy topping it. To me, this shows that Flickr has created the expectation that people stand to gain something from tagging their photos well. Maybe its the organization or the hope of increased exposure. Either way, I hope library catalogs are some day able to emulate this.

One feature that I found interesting was the ability to search pictures from Getty Images. I found one that I liked, and after adding it to my album, I noticed the option to purchase rights for the image. Walking through the form, I was able to select what I would be using the image for and for what duration. Completing the form would have generated a quote for purchasing the rights. This highlights something that Flickr does very well, giving clear information about copyright requirements for its images. Some are protected by Creative Commons licenses, other by traditional copyrights.

All in all I think Flickr is a great website. Its success is definitely based on the devotion of its users who upload all of its content and then organize. However, this is because Flickr allows you to organize and find photos well. Search engines do not excel at finding photos, because you can't search for what is the in the picture, you have to hope that someone has described the photo in terms you would use. On Flickr, you still have to do this, but the format makes it so easy, why wouldn't you.