Better Know a Content Source - Flickr

This is the second in a 435-part series (give or take) on sources of syndicatable content for websites. Sites covered in this series offer tools to publish content from their site onto your own site.

Flickr

Flickr is an online photo site where users can upload, store, and categorize their photos using tags and groups. Photos can be shared within the Flickr community based on tags allowing users to find similar photos with just a click. For example, a search for Niagara Falls brings back almost 20,000 results.

Flickr makes it easy to syndicate photos from their site to yours using badges. Users select a group of photos from Flickr by Tag, Group, or other criteria, then make a few formatting choices such as how many photos they'd like to have appear and in what size badge. Two formatting options exist:

HTML

www.flickr.com

More Flickr photos tagged with niagarafalls

Flash

www.flickr.com

This is a Flickr badge showing public photos from Flickr tagged with niagarafalls. Make your own badge here.

A few users for Flickr badges include syndicating pictures of parties, pets, or places to personal blogs. A badge could also be used to display pictures from a recent presentation on a business site.

Blog This Feature

Flickr also offers a "Blog This" feature similar to YouTube.com, allowing registered users to post photos to their own blogs alongside copy written on the Flickr platform. Here is a previous example of this from this site. They currently support an impressive collection of popular blogging platforms including Blogger, Typepad, LiveJournal, Movable Type, WordPress, Manila, Atom enabled blogs, Blogger API enabled blogs, and MetaWeblog API enabled blogs. Photo contributors determine whether their photos are bloggable. If they are, a Blog This icon will appear above the photo.

Great points, Wayne. Flickr offers a lot of control over photo usage, including blogging options and CC designations, but they're poorly understood.

Comments

1. Posted by: Wayne Harrison on August 16, 2007 9:41 PM:

When I did this, I got grief from a couple of people who had public photos on Flickr that I didn't ask permission to "use" their photos. They accused me of international copyright violations. Flickr makes the technology available but doesn't say anything about asking permission. My feeling is you don't need to ask to use a thumbnail if it's a photo marked public. It's fair use, as long as you link to the actual larger photo.. same as quoting a news story. You quote a small piece of the story (a thumbnail, if you will) and link to the larger story.

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