#5

This image is an example of why I like Flickr. Aside from being a mind-bogglingly massive collection of all kinds of photography, it's also an enormous collection of drawings, paintings and art of just about any kind. What you see above is comic artist Tom Gauld's contribution to a sketchbook devoted to David Bowie (you can find the rest (and should find the rest) here).

Flickr is a great way for individuals working in any kind of visual medium to maintain a kind of virtual portfolio. You can even subscribe to photostreams using RSS (I do). In my mind this works as a fully acceptable replacement for a blog or website for some artists I like, and I can see work they've finished just a day or two earlier.

Searching though Flickr can be in turns frustrating and delightful. Frustrating when you have to slog through literally thousands of images, concocting ways to refine your search in order to track down an image you want, delightful when you come upon a load of images you didn't even know you wanted. I've found images of not just artists' works but of artists-in-action that I didn't even know were available. I do suppose the question of permission comes up when taking photos of others' work, but Flickr offers a variety of Creative Commons licenses that users can apply to their photos.

I think it's very advantageous for galleries, museums, rare book collections and various archives to add photos of their holdings to Flickr. By reaching the wide audience that Flickr has, they have the chance to receive input about a work's metadata that they may not have gained otherwise. Yale's Beinecke Library openly encourages this sort of participation (http://www.flickr.com/photos/beinecke_library).

For sharing photos of my own I actually stick to Facebook. It is certainly not because of a lack of love for Flickr. Rather it is because a.) I see no point in publicly sharing pictures of myself or friends on Flickr and b.) any of my own drawings I'm uploading directly to Blogger for posting on my blog anyway. Perhaps starting my own Flickr might be a way to get my drawings seen by more people. I might want to get a better scanner first...

I think Flickr would be a great way to publicize events for a library, in the sense that you can record / take photos at an event, add them to Flickr, and have a link to recent photos on a the library's web site. It seems like this would be a great way to generate interest in library events. Or, as I said earlier, a library with some kind of specialty collection could post images of this unique collection to Flickr so that those items could reach a wider user base.