Image surfing!

What an enjoyable way to spend a few moments whilst on the Cam23 trail of Web 2.0 technologies.  Flickr seems very easy to use and allows you to see lots of lovely images.  I think my main concern with it flickr is can you use the images? What about copyright?  There goes my little "Jiminy Cricket" library persona.  The "creative commons" section of flickr does come in useful for that aspect of image use.

Having a quick search of flickr did bring up my egyptian wedding cake, which I found interesting, especially as lots of other cake decorators have commented on it being so unusal.  I've used one of my own pics in this post however, as it included our little figures of Indiana Jones and Lara Croft!

I also found alot of other interesting pictures on my hobby of machine embroidery.  Very useful to be able to compare and contrast other people's style and use of the medium (right) with my own (below).

However on the photo sharing front, I agree with most other Cam23ers, that I use Facebook to share my photo's with friends and family. The big question being... do I really want everyone to see my personal photo's or pictures? I think that really comes down to question of choice. Perhaps if I want to sell more of my pictures, I should actually use Flickr, like Cake in Chester to promote my work and make it more widely available.

In light of libraries using Flickr, its good to be able to have a store of images, but I'm not convinced that its any better than the images which can be downloaded from Google images.  As we have a large art collection at College, we are in the process of using an image storage system ourselves, which will allow us to put our library photo's in there.  This wouldn't allow them to be freely available though. 

In conclusion, no matter where we get the images from, they are useful in libraries, to promote, explain and show users what we do and the services, we provide.