I tried a lot of the mash-ups suggested in the North Texas 23 blog post. I love Big Huge Labs (aka fd’s Flickr Toys, of which Captioner is a part) and use it a lot for image generation (see Thing 5!). I didn’t like Spell with Flickr because my old eyes have a hard time with small, light text against a black background (a hint to some of you bloggers and website designers out there – think about ALL your readers). It was an immediate turn-off.
The Tagnautica link didn’t work: “Forbidden – You do not have permission to access this document.” I don’t play Sudoko, but for those who do, I bet Flickr Sudoko is fun. FlickrFling has an interesting premise (pulling images based on news feeds), but it was not easy to use and you couldn’t explore the pictures it pulled up any further as you can with some of these other mash-ups.
Flappr is a lot like flickrCC which I’ll talk about in a bit, but not as nice, in my opinion. Colr Pickr and retrievr are other neat ways to search for images. None of these limits the results to only photos in Flickr that have Creative Commons licenses, though.
Which brings me to flickrCC. As you know (or should know) not all images on the web are copyright-friendly. You do not have the rights to use all visuals found there. That is also true with Flickr photos in the overall collection. I’m a university librarian, and we’re always talking to our students about plagiarism – well, isn’t it plagiarism to use an “all-rights-reserved” photo you find on Flickr in your blog, wiki, website, etc., especially without crediting the photographer?
However, the folks at Flickr have arranged separate collections based on the copyright-friendly Creative Commons rules. The photos found in these collections can be downloaded and used under the rules of the specific license for that photo. Searching those collections within Flickr is rather cumbersome, though.
flickrCC is a great tool for searching Flickr for photos that are shareable under the Creative Commons (CC) license. This means flickrCC does the legwork in rounding up pictures you can use for projects, clip art, presentations, bulletin boards, and anything else you can come up with, so long as you give credit to the photographer.
Enter a search term in the box and click “Find”. You’ll get all photos with a CC license where *all* your search word(s) have matches in the picture’s title, tags or description. They are sorted in order of ‘interestingness’, the photo voted most interesting first, and that photo also shows up larger on the right side of the screen. If you don’t like that photo, just click on a different one on the left. If you don’t like any of the first 36 photos, click on “more” on the bottom left. If you want to edit the photo before you reuse it (for example, in an image generator), make sure the “FOR EDITING” box is checked (that’s the default) before you search. If you’re going to use the photo for commercial purposes, make sure the “COMMERCIAL” box is checked before you search.
Here’s a sample search I did on the word “library”, where I wanted to edit the photo:
Even better, Peter Shanks of Lithgow, Australia, the developer of flickrCC, has also included features (when you click on the “Edit image: in house” link) that enable you to crop, resize, add text and basic graphics to the image, and then add an attribution mark for the photographer. Here’s an example of a photo from the search above where I added the attribution (it’s always put below the photo and becomes part of the image) and some text I added onto the photo:
One more mash-up to write about – but that will be a separate post!
At the Fore-Edge 