Method #5: Smile You're On Flickr!

First off, I always enjoy watching any "In Plain English" videos by Lee LeFever. I really like how he puts things in general terms so it is easy to understand and the background humming at times and the hand signs are hilarious. I am familiar with Flickr but have not done anything with it since my North Texas 23 Things online experience. In checking out what other libraries are doing with Flickr, I was glad to see a discussion list. This will be a great place to see how libraries are handling certain things or to ask questions. The picture that I have uploaded is from our library's 2008 haunted house. It is one of my favorites. I use the caption "old librarians never die, they just bone up on good books." On a personal note, I can see how Flickr would be useful to categorize all my pictures but one thing that I would need to do first is get my pictures on disk because most of my photos are from Poloroids or disposible cameras (old school) and second of all it would help if I had a home computer. On a professional level, Flickr has a lot of potential for organizing library photos it just gets a little complicated sometimes when there are people in the picture. The hard part is that you want people in the pictures, you just have to be careful how you use them when promoting and marketing programs. It is also very time consuming organizing the pictures. I still would like to do more with Flickr in the future.

When comparing Flickr with Picasa, wow, they both have a lot of good features and it seems like they both do a lot of the same things. Usually when one site does something different, it isn't long before the other site starts doing it too. What was interesting is when I pulled up Picasa, I saw that I already had a couple of photos there already. I can't really say which I like more because I have not used either one a lot but I would probably start working with Flickr, only because the name is familiar. I did like the fact that Picasa could upload pictures into YouTube but Flickr might do that too, I just may not have noticed that in my readings. Can you say "information overload?"