Flickr for Homeschool

Yes, Flickr is a photo hosting service. So you can get the free account, upload pics, and post them on your blog, on forums, or in other social networking communities you frequent online.

We buy fancy digital cameras, make prints, some of us even scrapbook. We obviously value the photos we take. Flickr makes it easy to store and organize them!

Why do I use Flickr for our homeschool projects and my daughter's crafts?

1. Keeping all the things she makes takes up too much space. But I truly cherish them all! My solution is to take a picture and eventually (secretly) throw away the original.


2. Keeping photos on my computer makes them vulnerable to a computer crash. Even disks are not damage proof. Storing them online is my best solution. No matter what happens to our household, my photos are safely recorded online.


3. And lastly we live far from our family and from many friends. Uploading pics online keeps them in touch with what we're doing. When another homeschool mom asks how we do our notebooking pages or living math, I can send her a link to some examples!

Flickr is not just photo hosting but a community of people who share their photos. Now, if you don't want to share, you don't have to. You have the option of each photo public or private.

You can also set a photo so that only your Flickr contacts can see it. This is perfect for making pics available to out of state grandparents and no one else. I have some photos set to private. But most of my photos are public -- they are out there to share with others.

How can others find your pictures? There are four ways:

1. Tags
Tags are simply labels that describe your photo -- anything from the color to the content to the location. When people search for photos, they search for tags. So if you want your photos to be found, tag them specifically and thoroughly. A single photo can have multiple tags. Here's an example of the tags on one of my daughter's craft photos.



2. Creative Commons license
Creative Commons offers a common vocabulary for the online community to be crystal clear about what they consider acceptable use of their work. The strictest CC license would be "all rights reserved." That means you author does not approve of any use of his work in any way. A more liberal license (and the one I commonly use) is the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License. This means you allow people to use your photo as long as it is for noncommercial uses, they give you credit, and they share their resulting work with others with the same license you shared.

If you need help in choosing a license, visit this page for step by step wizard that will guide you through the decision.

To set your future uploads to one default license, visit this page.

3. Groups
Adding your photos to groups is another way to be seen. Browse around the groups page yourself to see how it works: Search Groups. Put in a key term you are interested in -- lapbooks, nature study, knitting, felt, homeschool, field trip, children's crafts. You're sure to find a group that suits your interests.

I invite you to visit two of my favorite Flickr groups: Lapbooking and Notebooking.

4. RSS feeds
You can stay informed and inspired with Flickr's feeds. RSS is sort of a digital subscription -- you get a daily report of all the photos uploaded with a certain criteria -- usually a tag or a username.
This orange button to the right is the symbol that indicates a feed. If you still need help, visit How to use RSS feeds.

Here's how to find a tag feed. First go to the tag page and enter whatever tag you're interested in. I used snails for this example.



Then scroll down to the bottom of the page where it has links to the feeds.



The next page will ask you which feed reader you use. Choose your reader, and you're on your way!