Indoors, with waiters and tables

Picnik is a new tool for me, and so this Thing is particularly exciting.   I'm a Photoshop addict, and have spent quite a lot of time over the last few months learning the tools and tricks, and would now consider myself a pretty competent user, but equally I know how unintuitive I found it when starting out.   I know there are a lot of tools around that aim to let you do the same kind of editing and manipulation but in a far more user-friendly way, but hadn't ever really explored any other than the functions on Picasa on my laptop at home.   Picnik seems like a really good option for this kind of tweaking - the way it links directly with Flickr is great, and the editing options are helpfully labelled with actual words rather than the not-so-obvious images you find in the likes of Photoshop and GIMP.   I played around with a couple of the photos I'd uploaded of the VHL, mostly just fixes like sharpening and adjusting colour/saturation/contrast, and also tried out some of the extras like the vignette, soften, Lomo and sepia tools.   I'll have to have a play with some of the wackier options another time!   For me though, much as I'm impressed with what Picnik offers, I don't think it'll tempt me away from my Photoshop.

Time future contained in time past

Georgia oat field? Southern U.S. (LOC)

One of the library-related web 2.0 projects I have been most impressed by in general is the Flickr Commons.   It has been up and running for two years now and contains a vast collection of photographs from libraries and archives all over the world, all made available via Flickr.   It began as a pilot project with the Library of Congress (whose web 2.0 activities are particularly impressive in general), and has since grown to include 32 institutions including the US National Archives, New York Public Library, National Galleries of Scotland, the National Maritime Museum, and LSE Library.   It describes itself as having two aims: to increase access to publicly-held photography collections, and to provide a way for the general public to contribute information and thereby increase the knowledge about the people, places and events in those photos.   I heard a talk from Michelle Springer of the Library of Congress at ALA last summer where she described how participation in the Flickr Commons had benefited the library, including demonstrating how their catalogue records have been enhanced with information contributed by Flickr users. 

I think the Flickr Commons is a fantastic resource, and I've promoted it a bit to readers here at the VHL, as there is so much there for US historians.   I think it's also a wonderful example of how libraries and web 2.0 sites can work together to really promote and increase access to resources, not only to their traditional users but reaching out to a worldwide community of web users.

Slipping and sliding and flickering through dreams

This week's things are right up my street, as I'm a picture addict.   Friends and family find endless amusement in the sheer quantities of photos I am able to take when I have my camera with me (current record is 587 for one week's holiday), and over the last couple of years I've been teaching myself image manipulation software - first GIMP and now Photoshop.   I have accounts on three photosharing websites - Picasa, Photobucket and Flickr - and I use them all for slightly different purposes.   Picasa is my site of choice for bulk uploading of photos to share, as I have the Picasa software on my laptop at home and so uploading there is incredibly easy.   Photobucket I use to store images that I want to post elsewhere individually, on forums or blogs/LiveJournal, or (with a URL shortener) on Twitter.   And Flickr is where I post my 'good' photos, more as a showcase.   I also use Facebook for photo sharing with friends.   Obviously all the sites basically do the same thing, but I think the way that I use them is quite reflective of how they are used in general.

For Thing 7, I'm therefore already well on my way.   The photos I have on Flickr already are a selection of pictures taken on various travels around the UK and the world in the last few years, and I've cropped and touched them up in Photoshop before uploading.   I have given them all a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike licence which means that I've chosen to permit other people to redistribute and modify my images as long as they credit me, and allow the same conditions when reposting or modifying.   I really approve of Creative Commons licences as a way to choose a less restrictive form of copyright, and as someone who also creates from other people's work I benefit from other people doing the same.   Since putting my photos up on Flickr I've seen my licence used, as I was contacted twice by a company producing free online travel guides asking for permission to include images I'd taken on their website.   These are the images that were used:

Included in Schmap Guide to Washington DC


Included in Schmap Guide to Brisbane

This week, for Thing 7, I have uploaded a few new photos that I took of my library in the snow in January, and added them to a new set to keep them separate from my other photos. I've joined the Ox23 group and added one of my photos to the pool - hopefully later in the week I'll have time to take a few more photos of the VHL and add those too.   I've also had a lot of fun geo-tagging my photos - as most of them were taken on my travels and so I had to zoom all over the world to find the locations to tag them with.