A Flickr Project for Everybody

I want your help on a project.

One of the many ways that I use Flickr is as a database of people. I go to Flickr to see someone’s face before I meet them, so that I might remember them better when I run into them at a conference. I do the same if I’m in an email exchange with someone I know, but that I don’t know very well. It turns out that Flickr is a great way to see more about someone’s life (You can also argue Facebook photos, but think about it: if I’m not that person’s “friend,” I can’t see all those snaps usually). Flickr also allows lots of ways for us to tag photos.

See how this could be helpful to a project?

To that end, I take lots of photos:

I’ll admit that it helps to have a nice camera. The folks at NikonUSA sent me a camera to evaluate. I call it my “blogola” camera. It’s pretty cool and their scheme worked, because I’d recommend the thing to anyone, but listen: you don’t need an amazing camera to capture the world around you. And this project just needs faces and names, not artistry. At least not on the surface.

The Project

• If you don’t already have one, get a Flickr account.
• Go to your account settings by clicking your user name.
• Push the second tab marked “Privacy & Permissions”

• Go to Defaults for New Uploads

• Set these to something in the range of: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike Creative Commons (some folks don’t care if their photos are used commercially, and others might want to ensure other uses of the materials as well. If you want more info, go to Creative Commons to better understand the permissions thing).

You’ve just set the permissions such that people can use your photos in blog posts and the like, should they want to remember people they meet that you’ve photographed.

Next, take photos of people and use tags. Tag their name. Add their company if it makes sense. Put as many identifiers as you want into the metadata alongside their photo. (Note: if you accept “friend” requests in Flickr, it makes this even easier, because your friends can tag the photos, too).

That’s pretty much the project: take photos of people, label them appropriately, and share them with the world. Suddenly, we have a useful database of visual information to go alongside whatever someone choose to put up on websites, and this database is out there in the open for Flickr users, such that we can search it, see people, and get to know them better through the photos you’ve captured.

What do you think? Do you have photos of people from events that you could contribute to the project at large, simply by sharing them and tagging them on Flickr? Are YOUR account settings right so that people can share in your brilliant works on their blogs? What’s your take?

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