Flickr/Yoga in the World

While I have had a Flickr account for about two to three years, I have not been active with uploading or reviewing photographs. I have a friend, a former photojournalist turned lawyer, who introduced me to the Flickr website. She is one of my only three contacts on the site. I sat down to think of a theme or subject to use for creating a folio to be shared with my classmates. The first item, which came to mind, was the bookmobile. With all the cuts in library funding, I have yet to hear much about bookmobiles being run by public libraries. As a kid, I can remember being a bit fascinated by seeing the bookmobile come to various neighborhoods in my community and others. I am currently preparing to submit an application for a part time bookmobile outreach position for a Michigan Library about which I am very excited. I loaded the word bookmobiles into the general search option for Flickr, but for some reason was not as moved as I originally believed that I might be for this endeavor when the photos appeared from my search. I then thought that I would like to have a theme, which included human subjects, so I thought about fitness and exercising. Admittedly, I have been lax in this area in recent months, but I still enjoy learning about interesting kinds of workouts. For a time I was pretty regular in my Turbo Kick and Zumba classes, but I was thinking that I might be overwhelmed with those types of photos due to their popularity. Then I remembered that I had been participating in various yoga classes over the past few months in my quest for increased relaxation. Of late, I have been enamored with outdoor yoga, and I thought that this would make for an interesting plethora of pictorials.

I first did a general search using the term outdoor yoga, and received about 1600 hits for pictures. Jackpot! I was pleased that my internal brainstorming had produced a viable subject theme. A local community near me sponsored free, outdoor yoga during the summer as part of their wellness program. The classes were held in a beautiful park complete with a playground area, basketball court, and outdoor stage. I attended a few of the classes and brought along friends on a couple of occasions as so I enjoyed the beautiful sky above me as I lie on my back in various positions. I also made a new friend who teaches yoga on a local beach for a nominal fee. I somehow managed to get myself moving for one of her 7:45 am Saturday classes, and hope to get in a couple more before the end of the summer. A few of my photos are included in the links.

I was wondering about the best way to organize my theme of photos for viewing so I read a few of the FAQ (Frequently Asked Question) streams under the Help section. I have some of my own photos organized into sets with labels describing what they contain or when they occurred. Some of my sets include themes with Obama’s run for presidency, family occasions, a tribute to my departed dad, and just miscellaneous postings. One limitation with having a free Flickr account is that you are only permitted a maximum of 200 uploaded photos, which I believe that I have met. At one time, I did have a Pro subscription, which I didn’t pay for since it was included as a benefit from my Internet provider at the time. The Pro subscription allows you to have an unlimited amount of photos for the yearly price of $24.95. From my reading, I learned that sets are only be used with your own personal photos, so I couldn’t arrange my theme with sets since the bulk of my photos would be public ones. There are also collections of photos, which can be made, but they again are all about your own photos or videos. Additionally, you must have a Pro account in order to use collections. As per Flickr guidelines, a set contains photos and a collection can contain sets or other collections.


Similar to a delicious account, Flickr allows you to add public photos to your favorites. You do this by opening an individual photo page, then checking the Add to Faves button above the photo. I went about the business of adding the photos, which I had gotten from my initial outdoor yoga search, to my favorites so that they could be readily available. Luckily, I had not previous added any favorites so I was able to dedicate them all to my outdoor yoga theme. Flickr also gives you the option of bookmarking photos via websites such as delicious. I discerned out that I could create galleries of photos, but those galleries would be limited to a maximum of 18 each. It was interesting to discover that this random number 18 had been chosen for galleries to pattern them after museum and gallery curators who are often limited in the selection of pieces for an installation. You won’t be able to add a photo to a gallery if the permission for sharing has been blocked or if it is labeled unsafe. Galleries give you the option of labeling why you think that the photos it contains are of particular interest. You will also receive an e-mail notification if someone has placed one of your own photos in their gallery along with a link to that particular gallery. Your photos can also be tagged with descriptions or labels. These tags help fuel the searches for types of photos.

While searching the term outdoor yoga, I discovered two photo groups from other Flickr users, beach yoga and Join Yoga in the World. I joined both of the two groups, and was able to add photos from them to my favorites. Being a member of the two groups provided me with additional pools of pictures for my outdoor yoga searches. I went into each group and discovered other photo tags related to my theme of outdoor yoga. Additionally, I will be able to review new uploads to each group when they are added. I ultimately determined that the most efficient method for me in which to display my theme of outdoor was through creating a link to my accumulated favorites. I created a bookmark for my theme of outdoor yoga in my delicious account and created a link for viewing.

Flickr is a useful tool for organizing groupings of pictures and video clips. The methods used for organization are akin to concepts utilitized in library classification. Tagging allows you to mark descriptive terms or phrases for your pictures contained within sets, collections, favorites, and galleries. Weinberger’s book discusses items being able to be placed in more than one category simultaneously. The tagging function in Flickr demonstrates that a picture can be included in a grouping for one person’s photos and also be found in an entirely different grouping for another person’s. For example, some of the photos, which I included for my outdoor yoga, were also linked with other collections for landscaping, scenery, and meditation. Creating collections and groups helps you to visualize concepts of classification such as with information in databases. One possible downside to the tagging function used within Flickr is that every account holder can generate a number of tags with no defined uniformity in terminology. While you are somewhat limited in your categories of picture groupings, you can accumulate photos in your favorites with no maximum threshold. However, I don’t believe that the favorites can be broken down to subsets, and you are not permitted to add your own photos. Flickr reduces some of its efficiency in that each individual photo must be opened before you can add it to favorites or a specific gallery. Adding a drop down or right click function might improve upon the ease of function. Overall, Flickr is fairly easy to navigate, and provides bookmarking capabilities. Flickr gives you several options for sharing photos as well. You may add them to blogs, share them using a personalized web address, embed pictures through links, and even create a specific tab of display called a badge. Flickr also includes protection for photos if you worry about copyright issues or want your groupings of photos to remain private. One other great feature of Flickr is the capability to upload pictures from cell phone cameras as well as linking photos to 2.0 websites such as Facebook and Twitter. I am pleased to have been reintroduced to my Flickr account in framing it as a tool for cataloguing items. I believe that this resource tool will prove useful in creating presentations throughout my library studies as well as for professional work environments.

I hope that you enjoy my outdoor yoga theme of pictures. I anticipate possibly building upon the groupings of photos by use of galleries with subsets of outdoor yoga. There are about 80 pictures included and I think that they are best when viewed when using the slideshow function.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/12174276@N07/favorites/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/12174276@N07/favorites/page2/


Petronella Holmes