23 Things Week 4: Photo Sharing

I especially loved this week's "things" because I got my first smartphone this week, and since it's a huge step up for me technologically I'm very excited about learning how to get the most out of it. So I'm proud to say that the pictures I uploaded to Flicker today were taken last night on my Motorola Atrix; in order to upload them as part of my 23 Things experimentation, I emailed them to my Gmail account from my phone. This is all very new to me, and I'm absolutely loving it!

Anyway, I have been a sporadic Flickr user in the past, and now that mobile picture taking (and sharing!) is a possibility for me, I have a feeling that I will be using it much more often. I know that it's possible for me to upload directly to Flickr from my phone, so I'm going to be exploring that in the next few days.

In terms of library uses for Flickr, I think the site has a ton of potential. I especially enjoyed this week's activity involving searching for geotagged images. After looking for Carnegie Libraries in Louisville I was able to search for them in Pittsburgh, where I lived last year; I then moved on to exploring some of the images tagged with locations of other places I've lived. I can see how this would be a great way of connecting users to images of places they are interested in researching for any number of reasons. For example, "animals" is one of Flickr's 150 most popular tags. Searching geotagged images on Flickr would be a great way for kids to learn about the animals that live in various parts of the world. It would also be a neat tool for geography-related homework assignments in general.

The Flickr mashups mentioned in this week's post were a lot of fun, especially "Spell with Flickr." While I admit that I can't think of a library-related use for that particular tool, it did seem like a cute way to sign this week's post. So, until next week...