Flickr or Picasa - Try two

Hey,

this is my second attempt to try to do the Task 5 activity, which involves using Flickr and Picasa.

I finally managed to get Yahoo to recognise my username and account, and got into Flickr and added a couple of photos to my brand new Flickr account.

To be honest, I don't really know what libraries are using Flickr for, except that it seems to me that Flickr is just a very large library made up of photos with patrons who contribute to the collection from their private collections.

Flickr certainly reminds me of a library - and it does have acces to both private and public (Library of Congress, NASA etc) collections. People upload their photos, and allow other people to view their photos, unless they've put settings on the photos for them to only be viewed by certain people.

I do like viewing other people's photos, and some of them are just amazing photos. Also people have different ways of looking at the same place. I've been to Darling Harbour in Sydney, but while I was browsing through photos I came across a photo taken off Darling Harbour and it is amazing what they saw and captured compared to what I did.

But that's me philosophising.

Anyway.

Flickr has tags - which is a keyword that you give the photo, which can find you other photos that are about the same subject or similar.  Flickr also has something called 'groups' which I actually think is pretty cool. Groups seem sort of like forums, but they're cool because they can share around photos within the group and have conversations as well. Which I quite like.

Picasa.

I had a little bit of trouble with Picasa as well. I thought I had to download it, and I was wrong. So if I had realised that earlier, I probably would have attempted to do this task last week, but ah well.

To be honest, maybe because I've spend so much time looking at things like Flickr, I feel as if a lot of the information is just the same information and things you can do, just in a different format. Although I do like the fact that you can make sort of different collages of photos really easily, that's cool.

But you can store all sorts of information on or about your photos - Title, who's in it, place tags, place it in certain galleries...but you can do that for both Picasa and Flickr.

I think I prefer Flickr to Picasa - it certainly did in the end cause me less trouble. : )

- library earthling