Flick-Flick-Flick-Flickr (Thing 5)

I use Flickr quite a bit already to keep up with my friends. Slowly my network of friends has dispersed around the country, and one way we stay up to date is through sharing our photographs. We use tags to separate our photos by subject, location, and time. We use sets so that we can look at pictures of new babies as one group instead of mousing through a stream of unrelated photos. Some of us are dedicated enough to join groups like the 365 days portrait project. I hope my tags, sets, and groups are all logically arranged because I firmly believe in the sanctity of the bibliographic universe.

For my new Flickr membership for 23 Things, I took a few pictures of me and my student-worker enjoying Flagler College’s archive—and, um, drinking coffee.

I had no problem uploading my five pictures, but I couldn’t for the life of me get my buddy icon to load. Three times I tried the same steps to upload an image from my computer desktop to the buddy icon. No red flag popped up on the photo upload area to tell me what I was doing wrong, but I finally realized my photo exceeded the 2 mb limit Flickr uses for buddy icons. Ugh.

To solve my buddy icon problem—because I couldn’t let my face look like that gray, bland emoticon—I used the same photo from my Flickr account instead of approaching it through my desktop. I went to the “All sizes” page on the Flickr individual photo view, and I saved the square image I wanted. I went back to the buddy icon change it in my profile and, voila, there I was! My square photo was finally less than 2 mb.

I next arranged my photos into two sets: “Flagler College” and “Flagler College Archives.” Yeah, they’re the same five photos for both sets, but I haven’t had a chance to take more photos, making the two sets distinct from one another. I also joined the group “Libraries and Librarians” and put our five pictures in there to share with the world of library fans. I added a friend contact to a fellow 23Things@NEFLIN-er, “cats23things.” I look forward to seeing what photos she uploads.

Behold, me, in action:

I may use Flickr to display some of Flagler College’s archival holdings. Since the archive isn’t really open to the public, I hesitate to reveal very much, but we have some cool pieces that could enjoy the digital light of day.