Letting Your Flickr Photos Wander
by Tom Caswell
I’ve been having a lot of fun with Flickr lately. I like seeing the different ways my photos get reused. From Wikipedia to Schmap.com to a women’s magazine. Just for fun, I have added a “reused” tag to each of the photos I know has been reused somewhere. Here’s what I have so far.
This is all just anecdotal, but it seems that people really started reusing my photos around the same time I changed all 1500+ of them over to an Attribution-only Creative Commons license. Although, for all I know, it could be that more and more Flickr users are enjoying the same kind of content reuse fame and glory regardless of what license they choose.
But I think it’s just as likely that it has something to do with my willingness to open up my CC license by only asking for attribution without adding a bunch of other conditions that make reusers nervous. The truth is, I really don’t care if people use my photos commercially. In fact, I think it’s kind of neat to see what happens with them. In a way, they take on a life of their own. And you never know where they might end up.
Any other Flickr users out there that have seen your photos reused?
6 Comments 
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March 24th, 2008 at 4:38 pm
I use the online version of Google Picasa for photo sharing. But, to be honest, I’ve personally never been a fan of sharing my photos online. But maybe I should… It almost sounds like a one-way ticket to fame and fortune!
By the way, what do you use as a desktop app for organizing/storing your pictures? (I assume you don’t just rely on Flikr?)
March 24th, 2008 at 4:39 pm
One last question: didn’t you have one of your photos of a shed become part of an online shed community or something? If there’s any truth to that, you should definitely update this post with a link to the famous shed.
March 28th, 2008 at 12:40 am
Yes, I actually entered my shed into a flickr shed group as well as into a competition called “Shed Week.” Here’s the invitation I got. Only on Flickr could you find this kind of thing…
“Please add your favourite shed images to this group..
If they are your own sheds then go to http://www.readersheds.co.uk, add them for shed of the year, otherwise add any sheds you find when you are out and about to this group, When “shed week” we will have a Photo competition will be judged by of team of top sheddies, So make them as arty as you like and you could win”
March 28th, 2008 at 12:49 am
As for your first question, I mainly just use iPhoto to keep things organized on my laptop. A separate hard drive and Leopard’s new Time Machine feature is all I use for backups. Flickr has a nifty tool called Flickr Uploadr (for PC and Mac), which is a cool utility for uploading my best photos. But I have heard good things about Picasa. If you use it, what do you like/dislike about it? What are the space limitations?
March 28th, 2008 at 8:01 am
I was thinking of doing a separate post on Picasa at some point. Overall I really like it, but there a couple things that I’d like to see changed/added. I don’t know that it has space limitations, though.
April 4th, 2008 at 2:01 am
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