I must confess that I am struggling to keep up with this programme. My initial enthusiasm is definitely flickering. I am so far behind the current Thing. Luckily Things 9 and 10 come as a pair, so I can take two steps towards the goal of Thing 23 at once.
I have come across one or two other sites where people can load and store images, though Flickr is perhaps a bit more professionally set up, and to some extent deals with the licensing of images, which others haven't. Flickr has many lovely images, and many that are amateurish, and I can't imagine are of much interest to any but the posters and their circle. Sifting through the mix takes time. The searches that I tried turned up quantities of results, even though they seemed fairly narrowly defined, and tagging very definitely raises its head again here. I put the name of my library into the search box, and came up with some pictures that were relevant, but many that were not. One person seemed to have tagged an entire album of photographs of a holiday, only partly involving Cambridge, with the same list of tags for each image, relevant or not, so I turned up dozens of images of other places, and only one or two of my institution. Spelling also came into play again here - some of my mis-results were due to that.
As my screen name is Lotusflower, I found a lotus:
It was uploaded by fung1981, and thanks are due to him or her (I don't know which) for a beautiful image.
It is very good of people to allow others to use images without the usual copyright limits. I am not entirely sure how much trust goes into putting images on a site like this, whether there is much of a risk that people will abuse the permissions level, and what can be done about it if so. I must confess that I am amazed at what some people make publicly available on photo sites, particularly images of their children. Whether they do this through ignorance about privacy settings, or the possible risks, I don't know.
Would I use a site like this? I am not much of a photographer, and don't have a digital camera. I have not signed up for the site at present. For my library ... Well, we like to have our images firmly under control, so use a private storage system. If I produced posters, leaflets, etc. regularly, it would perhaps be a useful resource, but I don't. Maybe I will decorate my blog for the time that it is active. I will see how inspired I am! The only use I have to date made of a photo site is for creating e-cards (the site in question has a facility to do this).
I have come across one or two other sites where people can load and store images, though Flickr is perhaps a bit more professionally set up, and to some extent deals with the licensing of images, which others haven't. Flickr has many lovely images, and many that are amateurish, and I can't imagine are of much interest to any but the posters and their circle. Sifting through the mix takes time. The searches that I tried turned up quantities of results, even though they seemed fairly narrowly defined, and tagging very definitely raises its head again here. I put the name of my library into the search box, and came up with some pictures that were relevant, but many that were not. One person seemed to have tagged an entire album of photographs of a holiday, only partly involving Cambridge, with the same list of tags for each image, relevant or not, so I turned up dozens of images of other places, and only one or two of my institution. Spelling also came into play again here - some of my mis-results were due to that.
As my screen name is Lotusflower, I found a lotus:
It was uploaded by fung1981, and thanks are due to him or her (I don't know which) for a beautiful image.
It is very good of people to allow others to use images without the usual copyright limits. I am not entirely sure how much trust goes into putting images on a site like this, whether there is much of a risk that people will abuse the permissions level, and what can be done about it if so. I must confess that I am amazed at what some people make publicly available on photo sites, particularly images of their children. Whether they do this through ignorance about privacy settings, or the possible risks, I don't know.
Would I use a site like this? I am not much of a photographer, and don't have a digital camera. I have not signed up for the site at present. For my library ... Well, we like to have our images firmly under control, so use a private storage system. If I produced posters, leaflets, etc. regularly, it would perhaps be a useful resource, but I don't. Maybe I will decorate my blog for the time that it is active. I will see how inspired I am! The only use I have to date made of a photo site is for creating e-cards (the site in question has a facility to do this).
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