Flickr defines itself as the following on its website: "Flickr - almost certainly the best online photo management and sharing application in the world - has two main goals:
1. We want to help people make their photos available to the people who matter to them.
2. We want to enable new ways of organizing photos."
We have never used a photo sharing website such as Flickr before and were a little skeptical at first. Why is Flickr so popular? Why is sharing photos with other people important? After establishing our own account and photo set, we learned that Flickr serves the same social purpose as blogs or YouTube videos. Flickr allows its users to express themselves through the photographs they take and allows its users to share these photographs with the world.
One of the major features of Flickr is tagging. Flickr defines tagging on its website as: "Tags are like keywords or labels that you add to a photo to make it easier to find later. You can tag a photo with phrases like 'catherine yosemite hiking mountain trail.' Later if you look for pictures of Catherine, you can just click that tag and get all photos that have been tagged that way." This feature of tagging is important because a well thought out tagging structure will help its creator find the photo easily and quickly and will help other users find the photos they want quickly and easily.
Another main feature of Flickr is uploading and organizing photos into sets for others to see. This process is relatively straightforward and simple. The first step is to upload the pictures. While Flickr does have software to make uploading easier, we opted for the more traditional way of uploading.
Flickr also allows its users to set privacy levels on its pictures to limit who can view a user's photographs.
The next step is to organize the uploaded photographs into a set or a kind of photograph gallery. A set is another way to organize a group of photographs based on a common theme.
At the bottom of the screen, all the photos that have been uploaded are shown. From there, the user can drag the photos to the center to add them to a set, which one can easily create through selecting the option on the toolbar located near the top of the page. One can name the set and select a photograph to represent the entire set. The set that we created is called, "Information Sciences and Technology Building at Pennsylvania State University" because the photographs that are in the set are of the IST building at Penn State University. We selected a photo of the entrance of the IST Building with a sign that says, “Information Sciences and Technology Building" as our representative photo.
The next step is to tag the photos in the set, so they can be easily found and searched for.
The user can give a title, description, and up to 75 tags for each photograph. To enhance search ability, we selected descriptive and common tags if someone was to search for my pictures. All of these titles, descriptions, and tags describe my photographs. For example, for our first three photographs, we entered the following information:
Although the screenshot does not show it, we used more tags for each picture.
For example, for our representative photograph, we used the tags IST, Information Sciences and Technology, Penn State University, Pennsylvania State University, PSU, and Buildings. If a user wants to find our pictures, these tags should display our photographs.
After using Flickr, we honestly do not like the tagging structure. Unless we are doing something wrong, we cannot find our photos when we use the general search engine. In fact, when we are searching for our own photos using the engine and type in "Information Sciences and Technology," no search results are displayed. We have also learned through trying to find our own photos, tags are not very precise and is very hit and miss. While it is a great way to quickly organize photos, it is not very efficient or effective. However, these are more criticisms against folksonomies in general. One of the features of the tagging structure that we did like was that Flickr provided more of a community feel as it allows other users can put tags on other people's photographs.
We definitely see why people use Flickr because it is a way to express oneself to his or her friends, family, or the world. While tagging has its pros and cons, we overall like Flickr because of the easy of uploading and creating sets or galleries user photographers. With the set that we created, we can show our friends and family what the Information Sciences and Technology Building looks like, and they can gain more insight into their world as we will if they post pictures from home.