NASA Joins The Commons at Flickr

NASA has just joined The Commons at Flickr, bringing the current number of participating institutions to 46.  As with all images in The Commons there are no known copyright restrictions, a fact worth noting whether you are a a scholar or creative artist.

The Commons' objectives are:

1. To increase access to publicly-held photography collections, and

2. To provide a way for the general public to contribute information and knowledge. (Then watch what happens when they do!)

To enhance understanding and access to the images in The Commons, members of the public are encouraged to share their perspectives and even expertise by tagging images.  But as Flickr notes, "Any Flickr member is able to add tags or comment on these collections. If you're a dork about it, shame on you. This is for the good of humanity, dude!!"

Image: Spiro Agnew and Lyndon Johnson Watch the Apollo 11 Liftoff, 1969. Available from Flickr with no known copyright restrictions.

Bulk Uploads and Downloads in Flickr

Do you wish you could upload and download images to and from your Flickr account more quickly?  Let me tell you about two tools that can make your life easier:

Flickr Uploader lets you upload images in batches, also giving you the opportunity to provide tags, titles, descriptions; select or create sets to include the photos in; and establish certain settings such as safety levels, content type, and who will see the photos.  Don't forget that free Flickr accounts are limited to 100 MB, whereas the annual subscription-based Flickr pro account permits an unlimited number of images in your account.

Bulkr is a third party tool that allows you to download images in batches.  You can easily create backups of all of your Flickr images.  Simply download the tool and launch it -- you will be asked to authenticate to your Flickr account and then grant permission to Bulkr to access your images.  Next, you can select your entire photostream, specific images, specific sets, or images marked as favorites.

You may also wish to use Bulkr to download images from other users who have authorized this under a Creative Commons license.  To do this, simply select the Flickr tab at the top of the Bulkr window.  Notice that you can search by keyword, and select Creative Commons under the License heading.  You can also search by individual users, groups, or explore by date the photos deemed "interesting" by Flickr.

Flickr Uploader and Bulkr are free tools, available for either Mac or Windows platforms.  I have used them both with success -- they are easy to download and use.

We'd like to hear from you if you are a fan of other Flickr tools.

Bulkr tip via Guiding Tech

MoMA's Flickr Photostream: Marina Abramović's The Artist is Present

Until recently I was unaware that the Museum of Modern Art has a Flickr photostream.  Then I found myself there, completely rapt, poring over Marco Anelli's portraits of audience members taken as they sat with Marina Abramović at her epic performance, The Artist is Present.  These powerful images convey the intensity of this experience, which moves many participants to tears.  As you can see from the images, this grueling experience also has brought Abramović to tears on more than one occasion.  Today is the last day that Abramović will perform at the MoMA, where for six days a week since March 14th she has been seated on a wooden chair for more than seven hours a day with no breaks whatsoever.  I look forward to reading about her account of the experience after it's over.

The majority of visitors are members of the public at large (a fascinating variety of people), but Abramović's performance has also brought visits from many art world luminaries, as well as famous musicians, actors, and writers.  It's fun to play "spot the celebrity" -- sprinkled throughout the Flickr set of over a thousand photos you will find images of Antony Gormley, Lou Reed, Isabella Rossellini, Matthew Barney, Christiane Amanpour, Rufus Wainwright, Sean Kelly, Sharon Stone, Tehching Hsieh, Andre Serrano, Kim Catrall, Joan Jonas, Marisa Tomei, Björk, and many others.  Because I'm sentimental, my personal favorite is Ulay, who showed up to sit with Abramović at the opening reception.  This is the first time the former couple have “performed” together since their final piece in 1988, where they each walked over 1,200 miles from opposite ends of the Great Wall of China and met in the middle to bid each other farewell.

Quite honestly, there is not a lot of prior content that would have drawn me and many others to the MoMA's Flickr photostream.  I hope the success of this series will encourage them to share more exhibition images with us in the future.

Not coincidentally, the VRC has recently added a number of images documenting Abramović's body of work beginning in the 1970s.  These images are available to all faculty and students at the University of Colorado -- see our Web site for information about accessing our collection.

Image: animalvegetable, Marina Abramovic / The Artist is Present (detail), 2010, available from Flickr under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 Generic License.

Images from the Spring 2010 BFA Show

The VRC has posted some photos from the opening of the Spring 2010 BFA exhibition: Image from The Art of the Future TODAY. You can find them at the Visual Resources, Art and Art History, CU-Boulder group.  At the moment they appear at the beginning of the group's images, but if you visit the group page after other images have been added, they can be found with the search term "20100423". Our stellar VRC student employee Sarah Derosier tooks photos on our behalf at the opening -- thanks, Sarah!

If you are a current or former student or faculty member and you have a Flickr account (or would like to create a Flickr account and participate), please consider joining the Visual Resources, Art and Art History, CU-Boulder group and staying in touch with the department visually.  Images might depict your creative work and interests, your research and scholarship (e.g., photographs from your travels), or departmental activities and facilities (e.g., show openings, the new Visual Arts Complex, etc.). Show us what you're up to!  We would also like to see some more images of this show opening, so bring 'em on.

For those who may be interested in the VRC's visual documentation of other recent events related to the Department of Art and Art History at CU-Boulder, the sets we have created on our Flickr account can be found here.

Congratulations to BFA graduates Brent Bishop, Yolanda Chichester, Elissa Eaton, Jon Geiger, Virginia Kester-Meyer, Eli Lichtenstein, Chris Lovejoy, Dillon O'Kelley, Mary Recchia, Jake Reed, Evan Rocco, and Maya Weinstein!

Images from Spring 2010 MFA Opening on VRC Flickr Page

The VRC has added 45 images from Friday's Spring 2010 MFA thesis show opening to the VRC Flickr group.

-- For now they should appear as the first 45 images in the Group Pool.  If someone has added images to the Group Pool in the meantime, you can find the VRC images by doing a search for "2010-04-02."

-- Anyone with other images from the show or from other Art and Art History events is encouraged to join our Flickr group to share their images there.

-- Congratulations to the grads on an excellent show, and to the CU Art Museum for its inaugural exhibition!

National Archives UK Joins the Commons at Flickr

Flickr welcomed the National Archives UK to The Commons yesterday.  As the UK government's official archive, they cover "over 900 years of history with records ranging from parchment and paper scrolls through to digital files and archived websites."  They have selected images they feel represent the broad range of over 10 million documents, maps, photographs, and artwork.

What can you find in the National Archives UK Flickr site?  While relatively small, it's an eclectic and intriguing range of materials.  There's a set of photographs taken in the Sudan and Egypt on an expedition for the relief of Khartoum by Anglo-Italian photographer Felice Beato (1832-1909).  There are two groups containing a smattering of nineteenth and twentieth century photographs.  Other groups include Artwork and Illuminations, Historic Documents, Seals and Artifacts, and Maps and Plans.  As with all content in The Commons, there are no known copyright restrictions.

See the National Archives UK Web site for more information about their vast holdings.

Image: Wall to Wall Crystal Palace, 1850/1, from Flickr, no known copyright restrictions.

U.S. National Archives in The Commons at Flickr

The U.S. National Archives has joined The Commons at Flickr.  Their high resolution offerings feature photographs by Ansel Adams, Mathew Brady, lots of images from the EPA's DOCUMERICA project (1971-1977), and many more historical photographs and documents.  You can view their collections here.  As with all images in The Commons, these images carry no known copyright restrictions.

Image: Erik Calonius, Interior of Graffiti-Marked Subway Car, 05/1973. From the DOCUMERICA project. U.S. National Archives.  From Flickr, no known copyright restrictions.

The App Garden at Flickr

The hugely popular photo sharing site Flickr has reconfigured its Services page as the The App Garden, a directory of applications built by external developers.  These applications access Flickr images and features (such as tags and groups), and present them in novel ways.  I've mentioned a few of these before (here, here, and here, for example).   Now you can browse a growing number of these tools in the Apps We've Noticed section, or explore them with tags or keyword searches.  There is also information about developers and for developers interested in creating these third-party applications.

Flickr provides its open API (application program interface) to developers so they can approach Flickr content in new and creative ways.  Some cool examples I discovered in my visit to the App garden are Downloadr, for downloading batches of Flickr images at the largest size designated by their creators; Bookr, for creating photobooks using Flickr images; and Flickriver, for viewing a seamless stream of photos on a black background, without having to hit 'next' to reload the next page.  If you are a Flickr user you'll find it worthwhile to spend a little time poking around The App Garden -- you are sure to discover something useful.

Localize Your Flickr Images and Search for Others

Loc.alize.us is an easily installed, free bookmarklet "that enables mapping, geocoding and geotagging directly in your Flickr photo page." A bookmarklet is a small program you can keep in your browser's bookmarks or post in a Web page. Geocoding is providing geographic data, such as latitude and longitude or place names, to maps and other items. Geotagging is assigning these kinds of data to files like photographs and videos. Loc.a.lize.us combines these technologies with Google Maps' API (application program interface) to let you geotag your images so that others can see where the photographs were taken. The localize bookmarklet is available here. Once you have saved the bookmarklet to your browser, simply:

1) open one of your Flickr photos
2) click on the bookmarklet in your browser menu
3) click on "Search Place"
4) enter a location and voilà, your image is geotagged.

You can also search for everyone's geotagged images in a Google Maps interface at the loc.alize.us Web site.

From the developer, here are the key features of the bookmarklet:

• Place Search: Find your places all around the world.
• Address Search: Street-level accuracy for US, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Japan.
• Fast Google Map Interface: Smooth zoom, large controls, map/satellite/hybrid mode.
• Fullscreen mode: Explore our world with maximum browser space.
• Link in Description: Let others see where your pictures were taken.
• Remember location: Your last saved view will be stored for later geotagging.
• Map everyone's photos: Run the bookmarklet on geotagged photos from your friends.
• Shortcut GeoCoder: Try searching for "nyc" or "10101".
• Longitude/Latatide input: Map values like "N 40°45', W 73°59'" or "40.75, -73.98".
• EXIF data extraction: Auto transform of GPS injected data.

and the key features of the Web site:

• Tag Cloud: Filter results by specific topics.
• Find People: See where your or your friends have been.
• Place Search: Find any place all around the world.
• Fast Map Interface: Smooth zoom, map/satellite/hybrid mode.
• Full screen Preview: See your photos in high quality.
• Shareable URLs: Copy and send dynamic anchors

Finding Images on Flickr: Advice Document from JISC

JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee) has just released an advice document, Finding Images on Flickr. With hints on using images you find on Flickr, sorting your search results, date searching, finding images using maps, finding photos taken by specific camera models, subscribing to photo feeds, and more, this document contains a lot of useful information. A section on further resources provides related links such as JISC's Photo Sharing Sites and Images in Blogs and Wikis, Flickr's How to get the most out of Flickr, and Creative Commons' Questions for people thinking about using a Creative Commons-licensed work.

Image: johnb/uk, old/cameras, 2009. From Flickr, some rights reserved under a Creative Commons license.

VRC Flickr Page: New Building and DMB Collective Images

The VRC has posted images on Flickr of our latest tour of the new Visual Arts Complex building (June 30) and of the July 3rd DMB Collective show opening at Vertigo in Denver. Please visit the VRC's Flickr group page to see these snapshots.

To view the latest VAC images as a set, enter "June tour" in the "search this group's pool" field at the upper right. When you get the search results you can scroll through them in "slideshow" mode by clicking on the Slideshow link on the right side of the page. To view the DMB opening images as a set, enter "DMB" in "search this group's pool."

If you are a faculty or staff member, student, or alumnus/a of the Department of Art and Art History, please consider joining the "Visual Resources, Art and Art History, CU-Boulder" group. You need to register for a free Flickr account in order to join the group and contribute content.

Data Visualization and Mashups: Tag Galaxy

Data visualization and mashups are both hot technology topics, and we might encounter and use them frequently without even recognizing them. Data visualization is simply the representation of data in visual form. Mashups may be defined very generally to mean the combination of elements to create new entities and services. Among other things, mashups might occur in Web applications, music, or videos. A good example of a Web application that embodies both data visualization and mashup technology is Tag Galaxy. It is one of many Web applications that take advantage of Flickr's open API (Application Program Interface), which allows third parties to access and manipulate images and data within Flickr to create new applications with novel functionality (i.e., mashups). Tag Galaxy invites you to search for a Flickr tag (a keyword that a Flickr user has assigned), and renders the search results of matching Flickr tags and related tags visually like a solar system (i.e., data visualization). This allows a user to observe the relationships among Flickr tags (and their associated images) in a novel and visually compelling way. This might prompt new image searches with previously unanticipated keyword combinations, which may in turn yield unexpected yet valuable search results.

The thumbnails shown here are from a search I conducted in Tag Galaxy with an initial tag query of ruins. The constellation of tag results include the terms temple, Rome, Italy, Mexico, castle, ancient, abandoned, and architecture (first image above). I selected temple, and in the next set of results chose angkorwat. On the following results (second image) I double clicked on the sun-like object representing the combination of tags I had followed, ruins+temple+angkorwat, and arrived at a "planet" comprised of images with these matching tags, which I can rotate with my mouse to observe in its entirety (third image). To see more search results I can scroll through more batches rendered in this "planet" form. I can click on any of the individual images to see a larger version and its title, with a link that take me to its home within Flickr.

Tag Galaxy and Cooliris (which I recently discussed here) are just two applications that use Flickr's API to search and display Flickr data in new ways. Some other useful tools are highlighted in the recent article by Ben Parr over at Mashable, titled 7 Totally Unique Flickr Search Tools.

VRC Flickr Group

The Visual Resources Collection has created a Flickr group, "a new place for sharing images among faculty, students, and staff members of the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Colorado at Boulder." We invite all Art and Art History faculty members, MA and MFA graduate students, studio and art history undergrads, staff members, and alumni to join the group and share images that relate to:

-- creative work and interests;
-- research and scholarship (e.g., photographs from travels);
-- departmental activities and facilities (e.g., show openings, the new Visual Arts Complex, etc.).

We encourage lots of tagging and descriptions; this helps with identification and context, and enhances access for all. To enable sharing of images for educational purposes, the use of Creative Commons licenses is encouraged where appropriate. We would like to see this become a valuable resource both within and beyond the department.

Tip: Cooliris, the free image browser plug-in I discussed a couple of weeks ago, is a really great tool for quickly and seamlessly scrolling through images in Flickr group pools. Try it; you'll like it!

Spice Up Your Image Searches with Cooliris

If you haven't yet tried Cooliris to search for images and videos, you are in for a treat. Cooliris is a free and easy to use plug-in for Firefox (Windows XP/Vista, Mac, and Linux), Internet Explorer, and Safari (Mac), which "transforms your browser into a lightning fast, cinematic way to browse online photos and videos." The "3D Wall" interface provides a gorgeous and seamless way to scroll through thousands of search results from the Web or images stored on your own computer.

Cooliris works with hundreds of Web sites. These include image search sites like Google Images, Yahoo Images, and Ask Images; photo sharing sites such as Flickr, Picasa, Photobucket, and deviantART; professional stock photo sites including Getty Images and iStockphoto; video sites like YouTube; social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace, and Bebo; and many others.

After installing Cooliris, there are two ways main ways to launch it. You can visit a supported site directly and perform a search. Here you may mouseover images or videos in search results and click on the Cooliris icon that appears; this takes you to your search results in the Cooliris 3D Wall environment. Or you may simply click on the Cooliris icon on your browser's toolbar and perform a search within Cooliris.

Once in Cooliris, a search box allows you to repeat a search in selected sites like Google, Flickr, Picasa, and YouTube. An option to search "My Computer" is a new and much anticipated feature. A Preferences menu lets you customize Wall and Slideshow settings. While creating and logging on to a Cooliris account is not necessary, you can e-mail others about images you find and save favorite images for future reference.

There are some features that I hope Cooliris will incorporate soon. A built-in save function is not yet available. In the meantime, Cooliris provides a quick link to each image's source page, where you can easily save the image to your computer as permitted. An advanced search feature within Cooliris would also be useful. For now, you can conduct a search for large images in Google, for example, and then launch Cooliris to quickly scroll through those results.

More information about features and compatibility can be found here. The Self-Help page also provides six ways to optimize the functionality of Cooliris.

Flickr Commons

You may recall that the Flickr Commons launched last year with a very successful partnership between Flickr and the Library of Congress. A little over a year later, the Commons now includes 23 participating cultural institutions. The institutions post photographs which they have "reasonably concluded" are free of copyright restrictions under a new Flickr usage guideline called "no known copyright restrictions."

Flickr describes the two main objectives of the Commons program:

1. To increase access to publicly-held photography collections, and
2. To provide a way for the general public to contribute information and knowledge.
   

User-generated tags help enable broader access to these photographs. For instance, a search on "artist" yields 175 results, "world's fair" results in 104 matches, and "vote" yields 54 results. Visit some of these collections to see if they include images that you might wish to use in your teaching and research. While you're there, use your expertise and unique perspective to add tags and enhance access for all.

You may conduct a search across all Commons collections, or within specific collections. The current Commons participants are:

The Library of Congress
Powerhouse Museum Collection
Brooklyn Museum
Smithsonian Institution
Bibliothèque de Toulouse
George Eastman House
Biblioteca de Arte da Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian
National Media Museum
National Maritime Museum
State Library of New South Wales
The Library of Virginia
Musée McCord Museum
Nationaal Archief
Australian War Memorial
Imperial War Museum Photograph Archive
National Library of New Zealand
New York Public Library
National Galleries of Scotland
State Library of Queensland
State Archives of Florida
Oregon State Archives
Nantucket Historical Association
The Swedish National Heritage Board

Idée Multicolr Search: Creative Commons Images from Flickr

Forced to leave campus due to one of our typical Colorado March blizzards, I am sitting on my couch catching up on the backlog of e-mails in my inbox. There I rediscovered a recent e-mail thread from the always informative VRA listserv (and the always informative Susan Jane Williams). It concerns a fun and potentially quite useful tool from Idée, the people who created TinEye. It's called Multicolr Search, and it lets you pick up to 10 colors from swatches on its site, matching the colors in images from 10 million Creative Commons-licensed images in Flickr. The results are returned as batches of thumbnails, each of which you can click on to be linked to its Flickr page. Graphic and fine artists can probably imagine all kinds of interesting ways to use this application. And since the "some rights reserved" terms of use are easily located on the Flickr page, one can quickly determine the ways in which the image can be used. For more and related information see the Idée Blog.

On the Topic of Flickr...

Check out this groovy application by Jim Bumgardner called Colr Pickr, which searches for Flickr images based on color.  I can click on the thumbnail images and be taken directly to their Flickr pages.  A quote from the web site:  This is either something that designers and photo editors have been waiting their whole lives for, or one of those "I've created this because the Web lets me do it" kinds of things.-- Alex Soojung-Kim Pang

Library of Congress Slideshow from Flickr

From the LOC's 1930s-40s in Color set. Working on our blogger skills...

Library of Congress on Flickr

In January of this year, the Library of Congress initiated a pilot project on Flickr with two image sets: 1930s-40s in Color photographs were created for the United States Farm Security Administration (FSA) and later the Office of War Information (OWI) between 1939 and 1944, while News in the 1910s images were photographed by the Bain News Service in about 1910-1912.  As of this writing these collections comprise just over 3,200 images, with plans for regular augmentation occurring in batches of 50.  The images were selected for this project in part because existing records about them are minimal, and LC hopes to gain a better understanding of how social tagging and community input might benefit both the Library and users of the collections.  The public is invited to tag these photos, and the response has been phenomenal.  Tens of thousands of tags have been added, and in some cases users have provided LC with valuable information that had been lacking in the scant LC records.  The LC blog reports that as of March 20, they have modified 68 of their bibliographic records thanks to this project.  One example of how the promise of social tagging theory is becoming reality!  LC neither grants nor denies permissions for the use of these images; they present no known publication or distribution restrictions, although privacy rights may apply.  While this project is exciting for the potential of social tagging and the current and possible technical interfaces that a service like Flickr provides, the LC Prints & Photographs Online Catalog still offers access to around a million images on its web site. 

Image: Jack Delano, "Backstage" at the "girlie" show at the Vermont state fair, Rutland, September 1941. From 1930s-40s in Color.