Using Flickr Part I

HARTLAND TOWNSHIP, Mich. — Flickr — a photo sharing Web service owned by Yahoo! — is considered by some a valuable tool for bloggers. Online journalism professor Mindy McAdams has a great post that discusses Flickr and using photos on a blog that I'd like you to read in addition to the rest of this post.

Her post talks points out how Flickr can give you — the blog publisher — a free source to store your photos, so if you move your blog from one service to another, you control your images.

A blog publishing feature allows you to size and write captions for photos. Creating captions is important in journalism so you can provide the appropriate credit and context, but sadly in Blogger is not as easy as you might think, especially for those who are not experts at HTML and cringe when you hear CSS.

McAdams also focuses on the importance of copyright. While it may be easy to use copyrighted images at the moment, it doesn't make it right and as content creators and good citizens we should be the first to honor copyright. Besides, it's simply professional and adds to our credibility to follow a bedrock principal of our constitution.

Called “Online newswire,” I found this 
image on Flickr through a search of 
online journalism. I used the blog publishing
option to create this caption. Notice it's not
perfect (See the white space below). 
Following the wishes of the 
photographer, this is the credit:
From http://www.flickr.com/photos/noodlepie/ /
under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 
(Creative Commons license)

On Flickr, you can search large numbers of images that grant permission to use in advance under a Creative Commons license. So, this is a vast trove for possible art to run with posts, but here's the catch with using those photos or from sites that provide stock photos. As a journalist, you don't know how this photo has been edited, so you want to be sure to explain the context of your photo in your caption. Being up front with your readers is critical to credibility.