Flickr is basically a photography site with an added piece–community.

Users can share their photos, join groups of those who have similar interests, or comment on photos.   Each photographer “tags” their photos with relevant keywords. That means you can easily search a keyword like China and find photographs relating to it.  

For educational use, Flickr allows photographers to designate photos as “Creative Commons” meaning that other people can use the photos in that area for certain uses.   Some are allowed to be altered, some can be used if you give the photographer credit–but only the photos in that section are considered to be “not” copyrighted per se.  You can find those photos in the Creative Commons area of Flickr.

Naturally there are users of this service all over the world, so you can get a tremendous breadth of photos and even meet the photographers via email, but obviously you will have different quality and different appropriateness depending on the topic.

You can also take photos from Flickr or your own photos and use Fd’s Flickr Toys, which I mentioned previously, and create movie posters, business cards, signs, etc. and just save them to your computer for your own use if you do not want to join Flickr. 

Flickr even has a blog, where they post interesting or topical photographs.

Check out this entry from election day!

Look for an upcoming Project Technology workshop on Flickr.  Any flickr users out there, post your comments or tips here!

  Nanjing Road, Shanghai  by Daniel Moore