Thing 5 - More Fun with Flickr

I've been playing with some of the photo sharing and mashup features of Flickr as I have gone along. I really like the ease of use of jd's Flickr Toys at Big Huge Labs:

I made a jigsaw of a beautiful fireworks photo I found at either Pastynet or at Quietlywild.

I made a trading card of my beautiful deceased Miss Kitty, who was a very special cat.

The postage stamp of my grandson reading was done with Framer. A similar stamp was made after using Picnik to edit a scan of an award I got from the Library of Michigan at a Rural Library Conference in 1995, but using another Flickr application.

I tried a Warholizer of Miss Kitty from the same photo as I used on the trading card, but there just was not enough contrast in the photo. I suppose I could edit this post and include it to show how it turned out. The image is saved on another computer. I'll try to remember to add it later.

I made a slide show of a small selection of photos of UP photographer extraordinaire Dan Urbanski since they are posted in a large collection of his work available online and put a link to it in a favorite things element of the blog . Not really sure of the copyright implications of this, but since they are freely available online and I used just a few and compiled them into a slide show for entertainment, not profit, and credited his work, I would hope it could be construed as sharing them, the same as his website "Quietlywild.com" does. And it seemed fitting to put a link to my niece Sara's music with it since Sara worked for Dan at his photography studio and is in many of the photos at "Quietlywild".

There are so many assorted types of applications that can be used with Flickr and the list is growing, so it seems like a place to come often and check out what's there and how it works. I did enjoy the Tagman game (like Hangman) but tied to tags in Flickr. It could be addicting like playing Solitaire in Windows is, at least for someone who likes words and spelling. Also liked the postcard viewer where I put in "Lake Superior" as the tag and got many beautiful images from Flickr.

So many things to try, so little time to play with them! I can think of many ways to use these features to promote a library in colorful ways in print and online. Even libraries with small budgets can afford to use these tools as most of them are free. Brochures that look professional could be printed inexpensively on existing library equipment for the small cost of supplies.