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Using Flickr to Organise a Collection of Images

Last updated: 18 June 2008
Published in: Managing your digital resources
Tags: delivery | digital collections | flickr | photo sharing | photographs

Summary

This document looks at the ways you can use the photo sharing site Flickr and some of its associated tools and services to help organise a collection of images.

Contents

Introduction

Whether you have a small number of photographs you would like to share privately with a few colleagues, or a larger collection you need to make more widely available, Flickr offers a possible alternative to setting up an in-house image database.

Having your images on a popular photo sharing site can certainly raise the profile of your collection if you want it to. Flickr is one of the more well-known sites, but there are others - you might also want to read JISC Digital Media ‘s paper Photo Sharing Sites for more on these, or look at our Finding Images on Flickr paper for advice on using Flickr as a source of images.

As well as exploring some of the more useful features, this document will also highlight Flickr’s limitations and point out areas where particular consideration needs to be taken.

Who uses Flickr?

Flickr hosts millions of ‘user generated’ images (and now videos – see box below) and comes in three forms:

  1. A free-to-search public Web site, available to anyone with an internet connection – no registration required, but users cannot upload images
  2. A free registration-required account for anyone who wants to upload, store or share their images – some limitations (see below)
  3. A subscription-based ‘Pro’ account (currently $25 per year) includes all the benefits of the free account without many of the limitations

At the time of writing, Flickr had just launched a new feature allowing users to upload video clips as well as images. Videos can be browsed, searched, described and organised in much the same way as photos. Clips can be up to 150MB in size and 90 seconds long. Only members with Pro accounts can upload video, but anyone can search and view clips. More information is available on the Flickr Video FAQ page.

Millions of active users upload their images to Flickr for many different reasons. As it is one of the most popular photo sharing sites, it’s not surprising to find that a huge quantity of images are posted there simply to enable easy distribution to family and friends.

Some clearly treat Flickr as a dumping ground for every photo they take, unedited straight from their camera or cameraphone – photos they may never think about again – or they may see Flickr as a useful, offsite back-up for their originals and nothing more. Others use Flickr to host uncaptioned images that they then link to from other sites.

This means a sizeable proportion of images on Flickr are of no interest whatsoever to a large number of visitors to the site – and the people who posted them have no interest in having a wide audience see their images.

Thus a large majority of images will rarely be seen by many: some because they are marked as private (accessible only to the user or their friends), others because they have little or no metadata (descriptions, titles, tags), while some are of such common subjects (e.g. cats, sunsets, famous buildings) that the sheer numbers ensure their obscurity.

A photograph of two firemen descending on ropes from the Eiffel Tower in Paris
Photo: Leucippus, http://www.flickr.com/photos/leucippus/143452830/
Used under Creative Commons licence

Other individuals use Flickr as a photoblog to record their daily life, or as somewhere to meet fellow photographers, seek feedback, critique others or publicise their work. These types of user are likely to be more diligent about describing their images and will take the time to investigate Flickr’s organisational tools. Their photos are the ones you will more commonly come across.

Increasingly public organisations, including libraries, museums, archives and universities – and departments or individual staff within them – are using Flickr for a variety of reasons:

  • To make images from their collections more widely available
  • To organise images from events or conferences
  • To provide photographs of their buildings and interiors
  • To share teaching resources or support materials with colleagues
  • To inspire people to learn more about a particular subject

The one thing all active members have in common is that they have entrusted their digital images to Flickr for storage. We would remind anyone using Flickr not to rely on it as the sole means of storage – make sure you keep additional copies of your original image files elsewhere. While Flickr may provide you with a useful alternative to setting up a dedicated in-house image database, you should also investigate other options. Further information can be found in JISC Digital Media’s advice document Systems for Managing Digital Media Collections.

Free account or Pro account?

It is perfectly feasible to sign up for the free account and use Flickr to organise your images without ever upgrading to a Pro account. If you are new to Flickr it’s probably wise to start off with a free account before deciding whether it’s going to be a useful tool.

Yahoo owns Flickr, and in order to have any Flickr account (free or Pro) you will first need to sign up for a free Yahoo ID. If you already have a Yahoo ID, you can use that on Flickr.

Even if you don’t plan to upload photos, signing up for a free account has benefits over the non-registered version – see Finding Images on Flickr for more on this.

The key benefits of the Pro account include unlimited uploads, archiving of originals, unlimited sets (albums for organising your images), ad-free browsing and access to statistics about your images (number of views, etc. – see below).

The main limitation of the free account is that you are restricted to uploading 100MB of photos per calendar month. Note that this is measured in bandwidth rather than actual space used – so if you upload 80MB of photos, you will only be able to upload another 20MB within the same month, even if you remove previously uploaded images.

If you aren’t going to be uploading many images and are careful about selecting which ones to post, the 100MB monthly limit may not be an issue. However, it does depend on the size of your images – each one can be no larger than 10MB (this is upped to 20MB with a Pro account), so if your camera has a high megapixel count or you are planning to upload high resolution scans, you will need to decide whether resizing or compressing them is an option – otherwise you could hit the 100MB limit with as few as 10 images.

A photograph of a shop window with the words 'Every Thing Must Go' stuck on the indside
Photo: Kevin Steele, http://www.flickr.com/photos/kevinsteele/439014224/
Used under Creative Commons licence

Despite the free account’s monthly limit, Flickr does not limit the accumulative number of photos it stores. However, only the most recent 200 are displayed in your ‘photostream’ – Flickr stores any others and only displays them once you have a Pro account.

It’s worth pointing out here that the only image file formats you can upload are JPEGs, GIFs (non-animated) and PNGs. You can upload TIFFs but Flickr will convert them to JPEGs. It is also possible to upload some Raw files, but they too will be converted to JPEGs and probably not in the way you would convert them yourself – we managed to upload a NEF format Raw file from a Nikon D50 but the resulting JPEG was only 160 x 120 pixels (the original was 3008 x 2000).

Although you can upload an image of any dimensions (and that image is stored by Flickr as your ‘original’), it won’t be made available at its original size – to you or anyone else – unless you have a Pro account. The free account automatically resizes the original so that the largest version available is 1024 pixels on the longest edge (or less if the original was smaller).

These last two points are worth bearing in mind if you decide to stick with a free account – if Flickr’s main photo format is JPEG and your images are going to be resized to 1024 pixels anyway, it may make sense to resize large images yourself (and in so doing compress them at a level of your choosing – see File Formats and Compression). This will give you a lot more room in your 100MB limit. The Flickr Uploadr can also be used to resize images (see below).

Depending on what you’re using Flickr for, you may not want to make high resolution files available – and if you only want to display ‘reference’ images, the free account’s largest size (1024 pixels) is probably sufficient. If this is still too large, or you have a Pro account where the original image is available, you can either upload smaller images (and save space – see above) or you can restrict access by editing the ‘Who can download your photos’ setting in your account. Note that this setting does not apply to images if you have given them a Creative Commons licence. In such cases they will be accessible to all at the largest available size.

Another significant limitation of the free account is being able to create only three sets (albums for organising your images – see below). Again, this may not be of particular concern if you don’t have a huge collection – you might prefer to use tags to organise your images, but the unlimited sets available to Pro users certainly give more flexibility and enable more logical image management.

If you are not registered or are using a free account, text ads are displayed alongside search results. If you are used to search engine text ads, these may seem fairly unobtrusive, but if you find them distracting the Pro account is ad-free.

So, although the free account has limitations, you may find you are able to work around them. However, for what is a pretty small subscription ($25 per year, around £12.50 at the time of writing) you could choose to bypass the limitations by upgrading to a Pro account.

Note: if you do not renew your subscription, your account will revert to a free account. None of your images will be removed, but you will no longer have access to the originals and your photostream will only display the most recent 200 uploads. If you have created more than three sets, only three will remain (those containing the most recent photos). If you subsequently renew your subscription, any extra sets will reappear, you will regain access to the originals and all uploads will be displayed again.

However, if your free account is inactive for 90 consecutive days, it will be deleted. Be aware of this if you are uploading on an infrequent basis http://www.flickr.com/help/limits/

Tips for uploading images

When you upload your first images to Flickr, the default method uses a Flash-based form within the Flickr site and walks you through the process step-by-step. If your browser does not have JavaScript enabled or the latest Flash Player installed, there’s a more basic Web form that can upload six images at a time.

A photograph of a grid of hotel windows at night
Photo: Ijsendoorn, http://www.flickr.com/photos/ijsendoorn/333903237/
Used under Creative Commons licence

Both these Web-based methods allow you to choose privacy settings before the images are uploaded, but neither lets you add a title or description before they appear on the site (note that the basic version does allow you to add tags before uploading, but it will apply the same tags to all six images.)

Once uploaded, you are taken to a page where you can add titles, descriptions and tags, but note that the images will already be available for all to see. You can edit any of this text whenever you like, but it is worth remembering that if you upload a large number of images using either of these methods, they will be displayed in your photostream before you have had time to properly describe them.

This is one reason why the basic and Flash-based upload methods are best suited for when you just have a few images to post. Another limitation is the lack of control over the order the images appear in your photostream.

The default order is by date and time of upload, so the most recently posted images will appear at the top of your main page. The order may not seem terribly important if you are organising your photos into different sets, but if others are keeping an eye on your photostream this is the order they will be presented in.

With the basic upload form, the six images will be uploaded in the order you place them in the six upload boxes. With the Flash-based form it’s harder to determine the order, but it would appear to be by the file’s last modified date.

Once uploaded, you can edit the date and time posted for any image. You may want to do this to change the order in which your images are displayed. Note that you cannot change the date uploaded to before the date you joined Flickr.

If the order is important to you, or if you will be uploading images in large batches, it is probably best to avoid the basic and Flash-based Web forms and use the desktop Flickr Uploadr instead, which gives you a lot more control.

While there are a number of third-party applications and plug-ins available, the Flickr Uploadr (developed by Flickr) is one of the more reliable and comprehensive tools we tested. It is available as a free download for Windows 98 onwards and Mac OS X 10.3 onwards.

Perhaps the Uploadr’s most useful feature is the facility to drag and drop images from any folder while working offline. You can either leave the photos in the default sort order, which is by date/time created (this is based on the camera’s EXIF data or the date the file was last modified), or you can drag them around into any order you like.

You can then add titles, descriptions and tags, either to individual images or as a batch, and decide whether you’d like to add any images to existing sets or create new sets – all before pressing the Upload button. The big advantage here is that you can edit away offline until you are happy with each image’s metadata, then as soon as your images appear on Flickr they will be as well-described as you have chosen to make them – and the metadata will come up in search results almost immediately.

The time taken to upload images depends not only on the number and size of images, but also on your network connection and the number of other users uploading. In our tests, the basic uploader was considerably slower than the default Flash-based uploader and the Flickr Uploadr. With both the Flash-based uploader and the Flickr Uploadr you get a visual measure of progress together with a reassuring ‘percentage complete’ indicator.

You can also use the Flickr Uploadr to automatically resize your photos down from their original size to one of four sizes: 800, 1280, 1600, or 2048 pixels on the longest edge. Note that this option cannot be used to make smaller images larger!

Uploading from mobile devices and via email

If you use a cameraphone, it’s possible to send your photos straight to your Flickr account via email. Flickr provides you with a unique email address to send the images to, so you can also send images from any email program.

Unless your phone contract includes a data plan, you will probably find sending full-size images prohibitively expensive. A cheaper alternative would be to send the photo via MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service aka picture messaging), but this method usually only works with substantially smaller files so is only really useful if you’re away from a computer and simply must post your mobile images.

Organising with the Organizr

As mentioned, once uploaded you can continue to edit tags and alter descriptions or titles whenever you like. This can be done on an individual basis, or by performing batch operations using the Organizr.

The Organizr gives the signed-in user an ‘admin’ view on their images. Here you can work on any number of images in a batch. As well as being able to batch edit metadata and privacy settings, you can add and remove images to/from sets, place images on a map, or send them to ‘group pools’ (see below).

Privacy and permissions

It’s very easy to change any of the privacy and permissions settings, but worth knowing what the default settings are before you start. If you don’t change anything, these are some of the settings that will apply to any images you upload:

  • Publicly viewable – images are displayed to anyone browsing Flickr
  • All rights reserved – images are not licensed for any use
  • All sizes are available – anyone can download any of the different sizes available
  • Not hidden from public searches – images can be found via searches on Flickr and on third party sites that use the Flickr API (see below)
  • Anyone can add comments – any signed-in user can comment, any Contact can add notes and tags

There are a number of other settings (e.g. who can see what on your profile – real name, email address, etc.) and it’s a good idea to look through all these under ‘Your account’.

Also note that some settings only apply to new uploads – if you want to change settings for photos already uploaded you can do so on a per photo basis or in bulk using the Organizr.

Keeping things private

Although Flickr is all about ‘photo sharing’, you may have reason not to share everything with everyone.

A photograph of a crowd in silhouette against a red background
Photo: macca, http://www.flickr.com/photos/macca/401829244/
Used under Creative Commons licence

You can choose who sees which images by changing their privacy setting. There are four levels of privacy that determine who your pictures are available to: only you; you and your friends; you and your family; or you, your friends and family. You specify who your ‘friends’ and ‘family’ are when adding people as Contacts.

The option to make images private can be particularly useful if you have photos that you need to share confidentially with remote colleagues. Not only will the images be unavailable to the general public, but also you can work collaboratively by allowing colleagues to comment and add tags or notes (see below for more on notes and tags).

Describing your images

If you want others to easily find your images it is essential that you describe them well. Users can sort their search results by relevance, and an image becomes ‘more relevant’ (i.e. closer to the top of the search results) if it contains the search term in the title, description and tags.

Try and include terms your users are likely to use when searching – if they don’t know about you already, they are more likely to come across your images if you use the kind of language you think will be most appropriate to them (e.g. subject specific terminology). On the other hand, if you are hoping to reach a wider audience, be careful to include common terms too – you may alienate or exclude potential users if you use jargon alone.

The title and description fields are fairly self-explanatory – you will probably want to use these to sum up and describe the ‘who, what, where and when’ in your image. If you don’t edit the title it will use the file name the image had when it was uploaded.

Here is an example of an image with title, description and tags from Scottish Libraries, the image bank for SLAINTE, the Scottish Library and Information Council (SLIC) and the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals in Scotland (CILIPS).

Scottish Libraries have also made their tagging guidelines (PDF) available.

Tags are extremely useful if you want to highlight aspects of the image that may not be covered by the description – for example, colours, time of day, weather, camera model, moods, concepts and so on. You can think of tags as keywords, which add a further dimension to an image’s ‘findability’.

Some points you should consider when tagging:

  • There is no ‘controlled vocabulary’ so tags are limited only by your imagination
  • Tags can be single words, numbers or phrases
  • There is no spellchecker (typos are rife on Flickr)
  • There may be alternative ways of spelling the same thing (e.g. building names and place names)
  • You may want to use more than one term to describe an object or concept
  • Flickr is used globally, so you could think about using foreign languages and US spellings too
  • You can let others add tags to your images (via the privacy and permissions settings)

Some users prefer to search Flickr by tags only (as opposed to full text) as it can improve the relevance of search results – for example, a full text search on ‘berlin’ will include any images which mention the word in passing ( ‘on the way to Berlin’, ‘a colleague from Berlin’), while a ‘tags only’ search will return just those where the user has decided that ‘berlin’ is an important enough term to describe the image

Of course, with any ‘user generated’ content this isn’t always going to be reliable – every user has their own idea of what is important or not – but it is worth bearing in mind the effect tags can have on search results.

You can also use notes to draw attention to a particular object in a photo, or highlight a specific area. This can be of particular use if you are working on photos collaboratively (e.g. to suggest an area for cropping).

A photograph of a yellow piece of paper with the word 'Note' written on it
Photo: S@Z, http://www.flickr.com/photos/saz/34630357/
Used under Creative Commons licence

To add a note, you drag and resize a rectangle over any part of an image then write your note. To read any notes that have been added, move your mouse over the image and the rectangles will appear. Moving the mouse over each rectangle will display the individual notes (notes on a yellow background were written by the person who uploaded the photo, notes on a green background were added by other users).

See JISC Infonet’s use of notes on this photo.

Sets and collections

Once you have more than a few dozen images on Flickr, you will probably want to start organising them into different categories. You can do this easily by creating sets – either within the Flickr Uploadr before you upload, or at anytime using the Organizr.

  • Creating sets is particularly useful if you have a large number of images: not only will sets help you locate your own images quickly, they will give others a good overview of the type of images they can expect to find, and offer a useful starting point for those new to your collection.

    Some examples of institutions that use sets to organise their images:

  • An image can belong to any number of sets, but remember if you do not have a Pro account you can only create three sets. Sets themselves can be further organised into collections – a collection can contain any number of sets, or it can be used to contain other collections. 

    Some examples of institutions that use collections to organise their sets:       

Geotagging – adding your images to maps

Many visitors to Flickr like to browse images by location. They can either zoom in and out of a world map showing everyone’s photos, or they can limit the map to an individual user’s photos.

If you think users will want to view your collection on a map, or the location is a particularly important aspect of the images, Flickr makes it easy to ‘geotag’ them.

  • To add a single image to Flickr’s map, click the ‘Place this photo on a map’ link next to the image and you will be taken to the Organizr. Then it’s just a case of dragging the image onto the map.
  • Be aware that you’ll need to zoom in to the closest level to ensure your image is located precisely. Simply dragging an image onto a map showing the whole of a city is possible, but you’ll get a useful warning reminding you to zoom in further.
  • If you ignore the warning you’ll have no control as to the precise location your image is placed. For example, if you drag an image of Nelson’s Column in London’s Trafalgar Square onto a zoomed out map of London, it could end up on a barge on the Thames! However, once an image is placed, you can drag it to a new location or remove it from the map if you change your mind.
  • You can also manually enter/edit Latitude and Longitude coordinates if you know them.
  • Flickr can import GPS/location coordinates from cameras that store such data, and will use this information to automatically geotag photos if you choose
  • Flickr’s own World Map uses Yahoo Maps, but in some cases you may find other maps show greater detail for certain areas. Third party map provider Loc.alize.us links in to Flickr via the Flickr API and uses Google Maps.
  • Depending on the part of the world, Google Maps or Yahoo Maps may have higher resolution and/or more recent satellite photos. This can help greatly for precision placing.
  • If you use Loc.alize.us, it will add the exact coordinates to the image as ‘machine tags’, e.g. geo:lat=51.463257; geo:lon=-2.620279. It will also automatically add the tag ‘geotagged’.
  • If you use Flickr’s map your images will show up on the Loc.alize.us map, just as images added using Loc.alize.us will show up on Flickr’s map.
  • Both maps remember the last location you used for geotagging, so when you next want to place an image the map will be where you last used it.
  • Some examples of geotagging:

Receiving comments on your photos

By default any signed-in Flickr user can comment on your public photos (and if you have any Contacts they can add notes and tags too). You can change these settings (e.g. so that only your Contacts can comment – see Privacy and permissions above), but you may find leaving your images open to public comments generates some interesting debate.

  • Comments appear beneath the image and you can delete them if you like – you can also block users from commenting if you need to. As with much interactive Web content, some users will be keener to comment than others – after browsing Flickr for a while you may begin to recognise some of the more active users – and many of the comments you come across will be of the “Nice photo!” or “Great composition” variety, or personal remarks from friends of the photographer.
  • Other types of comments are those asking you to submit your picture to a group pool. These are usually made by the group’s administrator and go along the lines of: “Hi, I’m an admin for a group called [...], and we’d love to have your photo added to the group”. See below for more on group pools.
  • Some people use comments to offer (usually constructive!) criticism or to ask for more information about the image. They may point you to similar (or not so similar!) photos taken by other users.

Adding your images to group pools

Any signed-in user can set up a group pool to gather images relating to a particular theme from other users. There are thousands of public groups covering a broad range of subjects, so if you decide to set one up have a quick look to see if something similar already exists.

  • Adding your images to groups can be particularly useful if you think your images need wider exposure – each image can appear in up to 60 groups at a time (or 10 if you have a free account)
  • You will need to join a group before you can submit photos to it – this is usually straight forward if it is a public group, but some groups have fairly strict criteria for photo submissions (e.g. users must be invited or nominated)
  • Most groups encourage users to add their images to the pool – consequently, some groups are huge with thousands of members and tens of thousands of photos

A photograph of frogs and frog spawn in a pond
Photo: Ashimjara, http://www.flickr.com/photos/21422879@N00/110068166/
Used under Creative Commons licence

  • Be aware that while a larger group will have more people looking at its photos, you may find that your images are rarely discovered amongst all the others
  • Some groups allow anyone to post any images regardless of quality, so if you are asked to add one of your images to a group (e.g. via a comment from another user), it’s wise to check first what sort of images are already in the pool before deciding whether you’re happy for yours to appear alongside them
  • The more specialist groups can be very small, and some are set to private where only invited users or Contacts of the group administrator (the person who created the group) can view and/or submit photos
  • You should also check how active the group is, as some may not have been added to for months and are therefore rarely seen
  • Groups can also be useful places to seek feedback from others on a piece of work, provide critiques, ask or answer technical questions, get photographic tips, or find interesting images by other users
  • Note that: “Adding a photo to a group pool allows any group member to view your photo and add notes, tags, and comments, regardless of the photo’s privacy setting”. You can, however, delete any notes, comments or tags that have been added to your photos
  • Some examples of group pools:
    • The Earth Science Teaching Resource group is a good example of how groups can be used. It was set up to encourage “sharing photos of geological and earth sciences subjects which can be freely used by others as a teaching resource”. It has around 70 members from all over the world and between them they have added over 500 photos to the pool.
    • The Art History Images group asks members to submit “images that could be used in the teaching of art history or other related subjects”. Although it advises users to post only images of “works that have no copyright restrictions”, it is not clear how this is policed (see also Licensing and copyright issues below).
    • The Visual Resources Association group seeks “Photographs taken by members of the VRA community who are interested in sharing images for educational purposes”, and sets out clear rules on what can and cannot be posted.

Pushing photos to a blog

If you have a blog, it’s very simple to set up a connection with Flickr. All the main blog services are supported, including WordPress, Blogger, Typepad, LiveJournal and Movable Type.

Once the connection is set up, you can post your Flickr images straight to your blog. You can also use this method to post images by other Flickr members on your blog when you see the ‘Blog This’ button (though beware of the copyright implications).

Flickr also makes it easy to ‘grab the code’ to share or embed an image in any other Web site – some find this useful as they can keep all their images in one place and link to them from all their Web presences (main sites, blogs and other social networking sites such as Facebook).

Pulling photos into a blog

An alternative to pushing images to your blog from Flickr, is to set up the blog to automatically pull them in.

This can be done in a variety of ways, but depending on the blog service you use will usually require a plug-in. Some will display your latest images as thumbnails in a side panel, while others will let you display entire sets in a gallery format.

Wessex Archaeology has a WordPress blog that pulls in photos using the Flickr Photo Album plug-in. The images, sets and tags can all be browsed within the blog with links back to the Wessex Archaeology Flickr pages.

A photograph of silhouetted archaeologists backfilling a trench as the sun sets
Photo: Wessex Archaeology, http://www.flickr.com/photos/wessexarchaeology/51568417/
Used under Creative Commons licence

It’s also possible to subscribe (or let your users know they can subscribe) to various Flickr RSS feeds (e.g. latest images, certain tags or specific sets) for automatic notification or display of new content.

Online photo editing

Flickr has recently teamed up with online photo editing application Picnik to give users access to some of Picnik’s tools from within Flickr itself. Clicking the ‘Edit Photo’ button above an image will launch Picnik.

You might find some of these tools useful if you don’t have access to your own image editing software (see also JISC Digital Media’s advice on Image Editing Software). The surprisingly impressive array of editing tools includes: rotate, flip, straighten, crop, colour adjust, brightness and contrast, exposure compensation, sharpen and red eye.

Picnik also includes undo and redo buttons and a zoom slider. The ‘Create’ tab offers further options to add text, frames, borders and other visual effects such as black and white and soften image.

Some of these effects are quite gimmicky, and you’ll find some marked as a ‘Premium Feature’ with the option to upgrade to a paid subscription version ($25 per year). Two features that may be worth upgrading for are the advanced editing tools (strangely hidden away under the ‘Create’ tab rather than under the main ‘Edit’ tab). These will let you edit Levels and Curves to fine tune brightness, contrast, tonal range and colour balance.

You can experiment with most of the premium tools to see their effects, but will only be able to save the adjustments by upgrading.

It’s worth noting that you can access some of these premium features for free by following the ‘Open in Picnik.com’ link, which will take you away from your Flickr page to Picnik’s site – the features are free because the site has lots of ads. Unfortunately the Levels and Curves tools are not available for free.

An alternative to Picnik is the recently launched Adobe Photoshop Express, which also allows users to edit their Flickr photos online for free. Unlike Picnik, photos cannot be worked on within Flickr and you’ll need to sign up for a Photoshop Express account. However, it’s simple to link up to your Flickr account and once done you’ll have access to all your photos and any sets you’ve created.

As you would expect from Photoshop there are some very useful editing tools (largely similar to the range on offer from Picnik), but not surprisingly some of the more advanced tools you would find in the desktop version of Photoshop (e.g. Levels and Curves) are conspicuous by their absence.

The Photoshop Express interface is very user-friendly and includes some nice touches, such as a history palette that allows you to see your edits as a series of thumbnails. You also get thumbnail previews showing how certain adjustments will look – just moving your mouse over each of these will preview the change on the main image.

At the time of writing, Photoshop Express was still in Beta and only available to United States users (though there didn’t seem to be anything stopping non-US users from selecting ‘United States’ from the drop-down when registering. Adobe states, in May 2008: “Users may experience slow performance if accessed outside of the US. Future updates will include availability in other languages and countries”). Given this and its barely launched link up with Flickr, it wasn’t surprising to find a few glitches while we were testing it: these may well have been ironed out by the time this document is published and would not put us off using it in the future.

The Flickr API

Photoshop Express and Picnik are just two of the third party services that use Flickr’s open API (Application Programming Interface). The API allows anyone with the technical know-how to write programs to “present public Flickr data (like photos, tags, profiles or groups) in new and different ways”. Those interested can find more details about developing services with the API.

While you may not be interested in creating your own views on Flickr data, you should be aware that there are a number of services using the Flickr API to display public photos and your images may be included. (Note that Photoshop Express and Picnik are a little different in that they allow users to access and edit only their own photos and not other people’s).

You can choose to hide your images from third party applications through your account settings, but note that this cannot be applied on an individual basis: your images will be hidden from all third party applications.

It would be an onerous, perhaps impossible, task to track down every single application that uses the Flickr API, but a number of them are listed here:

None of these list Photophlow – perhaps because it is still an invite-only beta (we received an invite a few days after signing up for one) – but it makes interesting use of the API, allowing users to share Flickr photos ‘in real time’. Users can join various rooms (or create their own), where they can invite other users and jointly search through Flickr images, discussing what they find and adding comments to images (which also appear as regular comments on the photo’s Flickr page).

There are also a few companies using the Flickr API to offer printing services. Most are based in the US, but some will ship internationally. More details are available. There is an option to allow others to print your photos, but this is switched off by default. If you choose to allow others to print, only those based in the US will currently be able to do so.

A photograph of wooden letters from a printing press
Photo: jmtimages, http://www.flickr.com/photos/jmtimages/1065000916/
Used under Creative Commons licence

How wise is it to rely on an externally hosted service?

As noted above, we would not recommend relying on Flickr as the sole means of storage for your original image files. There are further reasons why you should think carefully about having a third party host your images – and this goes for any third party service, not just Flickr:

  • While Flickr may be responsible for the hardware, software, support and technology behind the distribution and display of your images, be aware that they also control its presentation:
    • Your images may end up being displayed alongside inappropriate or intrusive advertising (only Pro users will not see ads)
    • If you choose to make your images publicly accessible, they may become associated with others’ less suitable content
    • Users may rarely come across your images if the site has a large quantity of similar content already
    • You may like the current layout, but you will have little say if Flickr decides to change it
  • Once your images are on Flickr, how easy is it to get them back? What about any metadata/tags you have added? What if the site ceases to exist?

    Flickr itself does not provide a batch download or ‘export from Flickr’ option. However, if you have a Pro account you can download originals individually. This method will not preserve any of the metadata (titles, descriptions, comments or tags) you have added.

    There are a few third party applications that will batch download images, some of which will also export metadata but we haven’t tested them, e.g. FlickrEdit and FlickrDown.

    If you decide to delete your account your images cannot be retrieved

  • Make sure you read the Terms of Service and Community Guidelines before uploading your first photo.

    In addition to explaining what you can and cannot do – for example you may not use Flickr to sell your images: “Don’t use Flickr for commercial purposes…If we find you selling products, services, or yourself through your photostream, we will terminate your account” – these terms explain what Flickr is allowed to do with your images.

    The Flickr terms incorporate the Yahoo Terms of Service. These are the paragraphs we think are worth drawing attention to:       

    • “You acknowledge that any personal data or information (or any other Content) posted to publicly accessible areas may remain publicly accessible indefinitely. ”
    • “With respect to Content you elect to post for inclusion in publicly accessible areas of Yahoo! Groups or that consists of photos or other graphics you elect to post to any other publicly accessible area of the Service, you grant Yahoo! a world-wide, royalty free and non-exclusive licence to reproduce, modify, adapt and publish such Content on the Service solely for the purpose of displaying, distributing and promoting the specific Yahoo! Group to which such Content was submitted, or, in the case of photos or graphics, solely for the purpose for which such photo or graphic was submitted to the Service. This licence exists only for as long as you elect to continue to include such Content on the Service and shall be terminated at the time you delete such Content from the Service.”

    The full Yahoo terms are available here: http://uk.docs.yahoo.com/info/terms.html. Note that these are Yahoo’s UK terms, which vary slightly in their wording from the US terms. If you are in any doubt, you should consult a lawyer specialising in this area.

Licensing and copyright issues

Please note: The information contained here does not constitute legal advice. It contains interpretations of Copyright Law by JISC Digital Media. No responsibility will be taken for the interpretation of this information by a third party. For specific advice on copyright, it is recommended that you consult a specialist copyright lawyer.

You should only post images to Flickr if you or your institution owns the copyright. In the UK copyright is an automatic right afforded to creators of original works, so if you have created an image yourself you own the copyright. Be aware however, that if you created it as part of your employment, copyright may belong to your employer and you will need to establish with them what rights you have with regard to publishing images. If you did not create the image, but you know that your institution owns the copyright, you should still check with the appropriate department before uploading to Flickr.

You will also need to check whether you have appropriate consent from anyone depicted in your images, and be aware of current data protection issues.

More information is available in JISC Digital Media’s papers on Copyright and Digital Images, Data Protection, and Model Release.

As we have mentioned, by default any images you upload will be marked ’© All rights reserved’ and are not licensed for any use by others.

If you are happy with this you need do nothing. However, you need to be aware that although copyright is automatic and does not need to be asserted in any way, some users who come across your images will assume that because you have made them accessible via the Web, they are automatically entitled to copy them.

This is a common assumption, and while the small ’© All rights reserved’ statement next to your images will do little to deter the unscrupulous, it may dissuade others from using your images without contacting you first. You could also add a more explicit statement in each image’s description and in your user profile, or you could add a watermark to the images before uploading. More information is available in JISC Digital Media’s Watermarking paper.

You may decide that you want other people to be able to use your images freely. If this is the case, you can easily change the default licence to one of the six Creative Commons licences (or you can choose different licences for different images, either individually or as a batch).

  • Creative Commons gives creators of original material the ability to easily license their content by use of template licences, from which they can select under what terms they would like others to use their material
  • The simplest ‘Attribution’ license allows others to use the work in any way they like as long as they attribute the work in the manner specified by the author
  • Other licenses prohibit commercial use, or allow no derivative works (i.e. you may not alter, transform, or build upon the work)
  • You’ll find brief explanations of each of the six licences, where you can browse recently uploaded Creative Commons images
  • Users looking for Creative Commons images can also search for them via the Advanced Search page
  • More information is available in JISC Digital Media’s Copyright and Digital Images paper

The Commons

The Library of Congress has over 3,500 images from its collections available on Flickr and is working in partnership with the site on a pilot project known as The Commons.

The project has two main goals: increasing awareness and access to the world’s publicly-held photography collections; encouraging the public to contribute information to enrich the collections by adding tags and comments to the photos.

The Library of Congress gave each image only one tag ( ‘Library of Congress’) and any other tags you see “were added by the community; we are generally not controlling the content of Flickr tags, notes and comments”. You can see how many tags have been added since the project was launched in January 2008.

The Library of Congress blog reported on 20th March 2008: “there are some tangible outcomes of the Flickr pilot to report: As of this writing, 68 of our bibliographic records have been modified thanks to this project”

A photograph of a man and a woman riveting the cockpit shell of a B-25 bomber
Photo: The Library of Congress, http://www.flickr.com/photos/library_of_congress/2179068949/
No known copyright restrictions

Flickr is inviting other cultural heritage institutions to participate in The Commons – if they can assert that there are ‘no known copyright restrictions’ on the content they want to share. Further details on the rights statement are available.

Since the project started, two other institutions have joined. The Powerhouse Museum and the Brooklyn Museum have both contributed some of their Flickr sets to The Commons.

Statistics about your images

Once you have a collection of images on Flickr, you may find it useful or interesting to know which photos people are looking at. If you have a free account, you can use the ‘Popular’ link under ‘Your Photostream’ to see which images have been viewed the most, which have comments, which have been added as favourites, and which are most ‘interesting’ (see Flickr’s description of what makes a photo interesting).

If you have Pro account, you can access more detailed statistics. The main Stats for your account page shows an overview of activity on your photos, with graphs showing the number of views over the last month, and charts detailing views, comments and favourites from the previous day (stats are updated once a day) and over all time.

You can also see how people arrived at your images by looking at the referring domains, i.e. which search engines or sites sent people to your photos – and what search terms they used.

Similar stats for individual photos are also available, either through the main stats page or on each photo’s page. The stats will also tell you if anyone has come across your images via a group pool. This is very useful if you have an image in a number of different pools, as it will highlight which ones are sending traffic to the image.

Further help and resources

If you need any help, the Flickr FAQ is a good place to start. The site also provides a guide on How to get the most out of Flickr. Other Flickr members can usually answer specific questions through the Help Forum, or in appropriate group pool discussions.

You may also find these JISC Digital Media advice documents useful:

Last updated: 18 June 2008
Published in: Managing your digital resources
Tags: delivery | digital collections | flickr | photo sharing | photographs