Things 9 and 10: Flickr, and using images

The Gallery of Cornelis van der Geest

by Willem van Haecht, 1628

Image from Wikimedia Commons.

I imagine that a lot of us 23 Thingers have spent a great deal of time on Flickr over the past few weeks, trying to find the perfect images for our blogs. In The Lost Art of Blogging post about using images, Tibi Puiu says

Personally, I take a great deal of time looking for the perfect pictures suitable enough to go well with the post. At first I used take even two hours of my time, going through hundreds of photos until I found the perfect one. Now, it only takes me about 20-30 minutes to come up with the pics

When I read this post while doing Thing 3, I did not believe that I would want to spend hours finding images for my blog. But I would be embarrassed to admit how long I spent (in my own time, at home) looking for an image for my tagging entry.

After devoting time to search terms and ploughing through images, the only really good image I found was the one Emma Coonan had already used in the original instructions, so I gave up, and decided that creating a tag cloud would have to do instead. The following day, I thought of the Magritte picture I used below, and was able to find an image of it within seconds. Moral: spend more time on initial thought before commencing searching on Flickr or Google images. The image required may be something familiar reached by a leap of imagination, rather than by exploring synonyms for the subject of the blog post.

Thanks to Libby Tilley for sharing a link to How to make Flickr work for your library. There is masses of interesting material to explore.