Publish-It
The objective of this module is to explain the advantages of using a photo sharing site to publish photos and make them available for other to use in their media projects.
The objective of this module is to explain the advantages of using a photo sharing site to publish photos and make them available for other to use in their media projects.
Publishing your photos to the internet can be accomplished in many different ways. You can post your photos to a class website or you can use a photo hosting service and post them there. You can also do both if you want to provide the widest exposure to your photos.
In this tutorial we will focus on posting your photos to a photo hosting service called Flickr. This service is run by the company Yahoo and is recognized as the top photo hosting site on the internet. The one downside to this approach is that you must create a Yahoo account (or use a Facebook or Twitter credentials) to take advantage of the photo hosting service.
There are a number of advantages to using a photo hosting service like Flickr. They provide a number of tools to edit and optimize your photos. Automatic photo optimization allows you to upload the full size original .jpg file and then it automatically provides a number of optimized sizes for others to choose from. It provides its own internal search capability and specific fields that can be populated with the same naming, description, and tag information which was determined earlier. Finally it allows you to specify the specific licensing terms which your photos are covered by. Search engines use both the Flickr information as well as the photo metadata when looking for photos.
There are two levels of accounts, a free account and a paid pro account. The primary difference between the two account types is the number of photos that can be uploaded every month. The free account restricts you from downloading original photos which are greater than 1024 pixels, and only allows you to view your 200 most recent photos. I believe that for classroom use the free account is adequate.
As with any online service care must be taken to protect the privacy. Specifically for Flicker I recommend the following profile settings which will allow your photos to be easily found, but will not put you at risk. Generally you should only use a generic non-specific naming when creating an account or when adding names, descriptions and tags to your photos.