Flickr and BubbleShare
Photo-sharing sites
By Chris Harris -- School Library Journal, 7/1/2006
What do pictures of a pen cap, garbage cans, a sad woman, and a rock concert have in common? They're all images that have been tagged “blue” on the popular photo-sharing site Flickr. The same tag (a keyword that indicates a subject or category) has been attached to more than 330,000 other azure-hued Flickr images.
Flickr and a similar service, BubbleShare, provide users with an online space to upload, categorize, annotate, and share their photographs. Think of it as a 21st-century version of the living-room slide show. Now the whole world can enjoy pictures from your latest vacation. Though BubbleShare was only recently launched, Flickr's roughly two million users and more than 155 million photos prove that there are plenty of shutterbugs who are eager to share.
The core service of these sites is the public hosting of images. That means you can upload a picture and the site will store it and display it according to your specifications. If free storage of large, space-hogging files isn't incentive enough, consider the various display options here. Both Flickr and BubbleShare provide common methods of displaying uploaded photos, such as providing links to use on a Web site or blog, a slide show that flips through a set of photos, links for creating prints, and an RSS feed to track photos uploaded by a particular user. Flickr is more about the social aspects of photo sharing and so user pages feel more like photo blogs, with space for comments and links to a social network of contacts. BubbleShare, on the other hand, does more with the images themselves, offering various ways to display your photos or create illustrated stories with bubble captions. There's even an option to record audio annotations. Other tools allow you to “BubbleZoom” on a portion of an image, or create an online photo jigsaw puzzle.
With increasingly powerful digital cameras becoming a standard feature on cellphones, these social photo sites will only continue to grow. This is your chance to jump onboard at your library. If the technical benefits of picture hosting and sharing aren't enough to excite you, imagine creating a rotating display of student pictures on your library's Web site. Or how about launching a BubbleShare project on the favorite books of your teachers and parents, complete with audio comments? Both services are excellent for promoting your library; just make sure you secure photo releases and comply with district policy.
| Author Information |
| Chris Harris is the coordinator of the school library system for Genesee Valley BOCES. |
