Lewis & Clark College has developed a collection of contemporary ceramics images in Flickr. I have not had a chance to look at all the details of the project but I am very interested in doing something similar for Wooster. The new Hales fund groups could really make use of something like this and it might be much easier than MDID. For whatever reason MDID has not seemed to catch on and so the need for a tool to allow faculty to develop image collections with rich meta data still exists.
Using Flickr as a campus image collection solution
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4 responses to “Using Flickr as a campus image collection solution”
Do you think publishing through Flickr would reach a similar audience? or a different one?
I’m sure there would be a much larger audience using Flickr instead of MDID. MDID is limited to campus and those you tell about the installation. Flickr is obviously open to anyone. I would imagine that faculty could mark photos as private.
My real desire is to have a way to have a campus image repository that is easy for faculty to upload images to and has some way for the institution to monitor what is allowed into the collection. MDID makes it too hard because of the way collections are created. The actual upload is not bad but faculty generally don’t want to think about the meta data. What I like about this solution is that they put in the meta data when they want to add it to the collection and many of them are familiar with Flickr already. I also like the fact that Flickr has so many ways to tie into other Web tools, something MDID does not have.
If enough NITLE schools were interested in something like this, NITLE could facilitate the further development. NITLE might also be able to engage Flickr in discussions of features that its member schools would like to see in Flickr.
What do you think?
Is it possible to make images private in flickr so that they dont show up in the search results but people can browse them when they know the direct address? I use many pictures behind password restricted sites and would like to use Flickr but don’t want the pictures be too public. Users wouldn’t have to make their own Flickr accounts to see the pictures. I have seen that many bloggers reduce the bandwith of their hosting account and put pictures to Flickr and link them to their blogs. The bandwith with Flickr and it’s pictures must be out from this world.
Hmm, I haven’t played with this. I doubt it would be possible. I imagine that the permissions are role based and when you declare someone as a friend or family member they are assigned that role (some flag is set in the database). If you then declare an image to be visible only to family or friends a check will be performed when someone tries to view the image to see if their database record has the appropriate flag set. This is my best guess as to how Flickr’s permissions would work.