ResearchBuzz

Here’s a fun find from the Flickr Blog: a new application called Flickr Poet, which takes the words for which you search and illustrates them with images from Flickr. It’s available at http://www.storiesinflight.com/flickrpoet/index.php.

The way it works is simple. Just enter some text, or a poem, or a paragraph. I tried the beginning of a Gwendolyn Brooks poem, My Dreams, My Works, Must Wait Till After Hell. You can read the whole poem at http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/gwendolyn_brooks/poems/20579 but here’s the beginning:

I hold my honey and I store my bread
In little jars and cabinets of my will.
I label clearly, and each latch and lid
I bid, Be firm till I return from hell.

Put the words in the search box and click Show Story, and the screen will slowly populate with images that match your words. Here’s how the Gwendolyn Brooks poem turned out:

If you don’t like how it turned out, you can click it again and you’ll get another set of photos to go with your poem. Clicking on individual images will take you to the Flickr page for that image.

The different sets of images sparked different reactions to the sets of words, and the various “Show Story” clicks brought a variety of image types, though individual images did occasionally repeat. There were only two things I didn’t like about the Flickr Poet. The first is the color of the letters. They’re kind of beige, which made them hard to read sometimes. You can’t match the letters to every possible color scheme, of course, but how about light colored letters with a dark outline? That might make them more universally readable.

The second thing is the fact that you can’t replace individual images in a story. You might get a set of images that looks great and really moves you — expect for one stupid picture. You can’t replace the one stupid picture, you have to replace them all. This might be intentional by design but it can also get frustrating!

Pull out your favorite poem and give it a try.

Flickr announced on its blog last week that the site now has a feature called “Galleries.” This new tool allows you to bring together up to 18 publicly-available Flickr images into a single spot, along with a title, introductions, and descriptions of each photograph.

You can get an overview of how it works at http://www.flickr.com/help/galleries/ but after looking at that I decided it’d be easier to jump right in. In honor of the upcoming North Carolina State Fair, I decided to do a “Fried Fair Food” gallery, because it’s always — ALWAYS — weirder than I remember.

Accumulating the images was easy. I just started doing searches. As I found items I liked, I just clicked on the Add to Button gallery above each photo. The first time I was prompted to add a gallery because I didn’t have any yet, but after that it was just a matter of adding them to each gallery.

After I had a reasonable number of photos, I clicked on the “You” at the top of my nav section and got a link to Your Galleries. I was presented with the page of pictures I’d saved. Reordering them was as easy as dragging and dropping, and at the same time I also had the option to write a short caption by each image. You can see the resulting small gallery at http://www.flickr.com/photos/researchbuzz/galleries/72157622287057199/. (Want to see lots of galleries? Check out http://www.flickr.com/galleries/.

On the one hand I really like this, on the other hand I’m worried that I’m going to spend a lot of free time now going through the Commons and organizing photos into galleries. Nice feature, and very easy to use.

Flickr announced last week some new offerings to the search engine. And while you can get a lot more information out of the search results page, I found I had to be pretty careful with the mouse!

You can do a Flickr search off any page, and of course there’s an advanced search page available at http://www.flickr.com/search/advanced/. This page allows you to narrow your search results by media type, date, and of course by Creative Commons-licensed content.

Now the search results show a whole page of thumbnails. The search box at the top of the results page allows you to narrow your search results from everything to those shots in the Getty Images collection or those in The Commons. (It’s great to have an easy to way to switch your search to Commons results.) Options over on the right of your search result give you the option to narrow your search to group, photographer, tag cluster, or even location.

This new search also allows you to get information about the individual images, and this is what I found to be tricky. If you’re in the small or medium view of search results (the default is small), hold your mouse over an image. You’ll see that a small i appears in the lower right corner. If you hold your mouse over that i in just the right way, and click on it, you’ll get a popup window with more information about the image including the number of views, comments, favorites, tags, and the date it was taken. You can see an example of this in this page of search results for tamales (haven’t had breakfast yet, again.)

If you DON’T click on it correctly — and it took me a little while to get the hang of it — you end up going to the individual picture page. I’m kind of surprised that you can’t get a popup of information just by mousing over the image, but I guess that would be a lot more information that would have to be loaded. I consider myself pretty good with a mouse, but that little i gave me a heck of a time.

In addition to the pictures view, you can also view group results for your search (man, people take their tamales seriously)
and people as well. Obviously the kind of results you get for this is going to vary depending on what kind of searching you’re doing.

Flickr has managed to come up with a search design that provides a lot of information without having to go through a lot
of pages. If I can just get that little lower right i to work right, I’ll get a lot out of this search.