Fed Up with Flickr? Considering TroveBox

For a long time, the photo hosting & sharing site Flickr has been instrumental to my work, both online and off. Four years ago I wrote about how we use Flickr and Creative Commons to find pictures for the blog, and just this spring I shared some tips from Brian and George about how to use Flickr to make better slides. But Yahoo! does tend to hate it’s most dedicated users, and the recent ad-driven redesign has a lot of people casting about for alternatives to Flickr.

I learned about TroveBox (formerly OpenPhoto) when Audrey Watters tweeted a link to David Wiley’s post about a post-Flickr world. TroveBox is an open-source photo-hosting site (more on this in a minute) that ensures you maintain control over your photos by letting you choose where they live: you can use TroveBox’s servers, or you can keep them on a…

Find Free Images Quickly With Compfight

Creative Commons licensed photos are a sort of internet miracle: By providing an easily-understood syntax for attribution and permissions, they make it possible to add visual interest to blog posts, web sites, syllabuses, presentations–anything you like, really. They also facilitate remixes and other forms of creative adaptation (or deformation), which can be useful in a wide variety of teaching and research contexts.

We’ve written about Flickr & Creative Commons before: I explained how to do creative-commons limited searches, and Julie suggested integrating creative commons-licensed material in your classroom. I also reviewed Wylio, a website that searches Flickr. (Wylio has since adopted a different business model.) Beyond photos, George has detailed how to find free, re-usable content for your classroom.

Today, I want to introduce Read More

Making Creative Commons Easy with Open Attribute

By explicitly permitting the sharing, re-using, and re-mixing of content, Creative Commons licenses are an important part of open educational and research practices. We’ve covered Creative Commons before: “Where All the Purty Pictures Come From: Flickr + Creative Commons”; “Using Creative Commons-Licensed Material in Your Classroom”; “How To Find Free Online Content That You’re Allowed To Re-Use”; and, as an example of this, “Finding and Re-Sizing Images with Wylio”. And every single post on the blog has a creative-commons image at the top of it.

Open Attribute is a new tool that helps you identify and attribute Creative-Commons licensed content. And while it is still in active development, and even though at present it is only available for Firefox and Chrome (Opera and Safari are coming soon!), it is still a dead-simple, and pretty convenient, tool.

Open Attribute is a…

Finding and Resizing Images with Wylio

As Natalie’s post from Monday made clear, ProfHacker often writes about finding, using, and manipulating images online. The key to all of our writing about images is Creative Commons (here and here), a system for licensing material for sharing, remixing, and reusing in all sorts of ways.

While Creative Commons makes finding freely-available images relatively easy, especially through Flickr, the process of getting that picture onto your website or blog (or slide deck or . . .) can still be a bit of a hassle. Enter Wylio.com, a newish (October 2010) frontend to Flickr that searches Creative Commons-licensed pictures, lets you resize and position the picture on a page, and then gives you an HTML snipped to copy-and-paste.

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Using Creative Commons Licensed Material in Your Classroom

CC in Education Previously at ProfHacker, I’ve discussed talking about fair use in the classroom and George provided some links regarding intellectual property. All of the ProfHacker content previously found at ProfHacker.com and now here at the Chronicle carries a Creative Commons license, and ProfHacker authors are committed to providing content under such a license whenever possible. For example, on many of our own web sites you can find course material licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike license or something similar.

Your mileage may vary. You may want to keep your course content entirely to yourself—after all it is your work product—and that’s just fine, of course. This post isn’t about that, or even about open courseware in general. For Chronicle coverage on such matters, see their articles such as “Students’ Push for Open Education Meets Faculty Ambivalence,…

How to find free, online content that you’re allowed to re-use

A couple of weeks ago, Jason explained how ProfHacker finds most of the images that we use on this site: we search the photo-sharing site Flickr for pictures that have a particular kind of Creative Commons license.

There are several different permutations of these licenses, which are designed to provide a creator with more flexibility than copyright provides without requiring the creator to give up copyright. They’re also a pretty convenient bit of information for people looking to “remix” materials originally created by someone else and then shared online with a license that allows remixing.

As you might imagine, images are only one sort of digital content available online with Creative Commons licenses: one can also find CC-licensed audio, video, and text documents of various kinds. “Exactly how,” you may well ask, “does one find this wealth of materials?”…

Where All the Purty Pictures Come From: Flickr + Creative Commons

We consistently get comments about the pictures associated with the posts on ProfHacker, and so I thought it might be worth a quick post explaining where they come from. ProfHacker images almost always come from Flickr, the amazing photo hosting and sharing service, and we use photos that have something called a Creative Commons license. In this post, I’ll say a bit about both of these, and then show how we find the photos we use. (Hopefully that won’t spoil the magic, or anything. But you could also use this method to find pictures for your syllabus, for instance.)

Flickr

Flickr is like The Wire: If you don’t know it, remedying that is more important than anything else you could be doing right now. (And I say that despite today’s l-o-n-g outage.) Flickr not only hosts your pictures and videos: you can edit them (using Picnik), organize them into sets (your own photos) or