Tag: flickr

Posted on
by

I am pretty keen on posting photos to the Internet, not because I have great interest (or any skill) in photography but as an alternative, to blogging, way of recording events. I’ve been using flickr since 2004 and am currently enjoying instagram (mine via api) and posterous

Mostly I take photos with my phone (the best camera). Recently I’ve been testing the ways apple gives you to post photos from an iOS device.

Public Photo Stream

I’ve become a fan of photo stream,

When you take photos on an iOS device or import photos from your digital camera to your computer, Photo Stream will automatically upload it so it is available on all your devices.

You can also publish photos to a public photo stream.

Here is a guide to making a public photo stream. Click to see a bigger version:

How to Photo Stream 500

And here is the photo stream:
Ben Challum – Photo Stream. These are simple and quick to create and easy to share.

iPhoto Journals

For these you ned to buy iPhoto. There are a wee bit more complex and interesting as you can include a variety of different elements, including, map, weather, notes and the like.

Journal Elements

Again they are pretty straightforward to create and upload. Here are much the same photos as a journal: Ben Challum.

Here is the gallery, created on an iPad viewed in iPhoto on a iPhone

Journal iPhone

Photo Stream vs Journal

On thing I noticed with photo stream was that you could post a link, before the photos are uploaded. With iPhoto journals you have uploaded the whole journal before you can share the link. You can share a photo stream privately, although I don’t think I would. Both produce online sites with pretty horrible urls (eg: https://www.icloud.com/journal/#2;CAEQARoQpdbIWlofBmKRAh_cPbtctA;09537452-2A80-49C7-A86F-71E8734846CF!).

Photo stream is quicker, with less choice, with a journal you can edit the layout of photos easily (especially easy on an iPad). Journals have more features for telling a story by adding non photographic information. The photo stream seem to be designed to share photos as you go.

Educational Use

I could see the photo stream being used by a class or group to share photos and images with each other as they go allowing them to work on or use images created on classmates devices as they are created. It is simple to add images to a shared photo stream over a period.

Shared Photo Streams don’t count against your iCloud storage, and they work over Wi-Fi and cellular networks.

Apple – iCloud – photo stream. Realistically I doubt there are many cellular devices in our classrooms.

Journals are more suit to creating artefacts, perhaps using photos gather via photo stream. Journals allow the addition of text, editing of layout and look like an interesting way to tell a story, record some learning and share it, a fairly easy way to create a image heavy, attractive mini Web site.

Thus far and no further

Apart from the lengthy and un-rememberable urls the other thing I don’t like is the locked in aspect of the sharing. There is on api or RSS feed that could be used take the images and reposition them, but I suppose that is what flickr is for.

Flickr Export from iPhoto

This is pretty good, it is easy from iPhoto on iOS to send images to flickr, create sets and tagging photos as they go, here are the same pictures on Flickr: Ben Challum – a set on Flickr and flickr makes it easy to repurpose the images:

 

above updated 18 Oct 2022, the object/flash embed code replaced by the url to the set!

Although both photo stream and journals provide slideshow views there is no way, as far as I can see, to show these elsewhere.

Finally

I still like to play with putting photos on a map: A Mapped Walk and a have a reasonable workflow that let me put that together in about 20 minutes. I also like messing with panos so here is one from the same walk:
Ben Challum Pano.

Posted on
by

Haiku Deck is

the simple new way to create stunning presentations – whether you are pitching an idea, teaching a lesson, telling a story, or igniting a movement, it’s fast, fun and simple for anyone to use.

Says Haiku Deck. It is an iPad application for making presentations. Very simple to use and the defaults look nice.

That took about three minutes to knock up. The main feature, based on three minutes use, seem to be a nice search to find images to match your words. Looks like it searches Flickr and some other sources. It does some sort of cc search. I don’t think it quite respects the license though. This image:

Winner

By David Muir is licensed under a Creative Commons — Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic — CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 license. Unfortunately the app does not seem to do the attribution for you.

Haiku deck says:

Where do Haiku Deck images come from?
Haiku Deck finds images from across the Internet that photographers have licensed under the Creative Commons license. Some Creative Commons images carry a “not for commercial use” restriction. If you’re making a Haiku Deck for commercial use, please be sure to turn the “commercial use only” filter.

I am not sure that is in the spirit of the attribution part of the license?

It does however make a very presentable presentation pretty quickly, saving to the web, announcing by twitter and providing an embed code. It also exports to PDF via mail.

The price is right, free with some paid for themes, the app is extremely easy to use and if they added attribution to the images it would be even better.

Update, my bad: I had adjusted the embed code to fit the iframe into my blog the attribution appears on the Haiku Deck website: Radio #EDUtalk – A Haiku Deck from Giant Thinkwell and on the embed if you don’t mess about with the code to resize the iFrame. Apologies to Giant Thinkwell.

So here is the attribution copied from the Radio #EDUtalk – A Haiku Deck from Giant Thinkwell page:

Much to my embarrassment I asked about this on twitter: Twitter / kleneway: @johnjohnston @HaikuDeck you …

Update 2: I’e also noticed a nice feature, republish a slideshow with an extra slide updates the original and the embed.

Blogged with a hand knitted system

Posted on
by

Flickr cc Picmonkey

Every so often something nice happens:

Which made me look again at the flickr CC search toy. A while back I posted about Picnik closing and then about PicMonkey which is a picnik replacement. The nice folk at PicMonkey let me know that the picmonky API is the same as the picnic one, so I thought I’d swap them out. As you can see from the screenshot, if the images found in the flickr CC search toy allow editing (ie NoDerivs is not in the License) there is a link to edit the picture in PicMonkey. I’ve changed the way this works so that PicMonkey will load the medium sized photo with the attribution stamped on it, rather than the original flickr image. Before I was expecting pupils to be able to add the attribution themselves if editing the picture.

I’ve also added a checkbox to the search form to only search for pictures you can edit.

The code behind this, php and javascript is a very messy affair. I intend to work thorough the whole thing sometime and make it more efficient etc.

If you have ideas of how this could be more useful to primary aged pupils please let me know.

Posted on
by

Last week I was in a class doing another setup a blog/eportfolio session using Glow blogs. The process is a bit long winded due to the way glow blogs are set up. Usually there is little time to do much more than set them up and get the pupils to do a quick test post. I usually just get pupils to use a bit of clipart to show tem how to add an image. O this occasion there was a fair mix of machines and operation systems in the room and not all had clip art. I decided to use A flickr CC search toy to let the pupil download photos with attribution stamped on. This worked fine, but there was a little confusion about naming saved files, the file name suggested is stamp.php.jpg as the images, with attribution, are generated on the fly.

This weekend I had a quick google to see if I could find out how this can be improved. I am now using:

header('Content-Disposition: inline; filename='. $title .'.jpg' );

To give the files a title derived from the flickr image title. I also found I could cause the image to be downloaded by using Content-Disposition: attachment but decided against that at the moment. Now when pupils right click on an image they should see something like this:

Flickrcc File Dialog

Another alternative would be to show the image on a page with instructions on right clicking to get the save dialog. Again I’ve not implemented that either.

Posted on
by

studying… by fazen
Attribution License

A couple of days ago I was reading Building the No English Words Translation Tool on Alan Levine's space for barking about and playing with technology he described how he was building a tool for ds106 Words With No English Translation with some JavaScript, as I popped on a comment I was reminded of http://iheartquotes.com/api an API for getting quotes. and had a wee play to produce Pics for Quotes (or a better title) a simple webpage that pulls in a random quote and then allows you to click on it to search flickr for the word clicked on. I wondered if this could be a ds106 assignment.

Alan comment back with some suggestions:

“Visualize That Quote”- rather than provide choices to pick from Flickr for each word; maybe random generate one image per word. The activity would be to illustrate/explain the quote in pictures with the least number of pictures required. The user could X out ones they did not need (and they would dissapear) and perhaps allow a click to generate a new random image to replace it. They would then do a screenshot to save their work? Perhaps generate a score where there is advantages to lower numbers of pictures and fewer image replacements?

I did a bit of work and got a basic implimentation of Alan's suggestions going. Alan then blogged about it again with some more suggestions:

  • See if it can skip unnecessary words like “a”, “the”, “of”
  • Be able to return a word if we accidentally click it closed
  • Tweak the css for thr “attribution” link at bottom (sometimes overlaps the license text)
  • Make it so when you hide the titlebars, it also hides the text of the words and the quote, to make it a true guessing game.

I've managed to make most of these changes and have a sort of working page: Visualize That Quote that has become a ds106 Assignment Visualize That Quote — MISSION: DS106

What Visualize That Quote Does

  1. Pulls in a random quote of less than 8 characters from the Quotes API and displays it.
  2. Searchs Flickr for a creative commons images to go with each word and shows one for each word.
  3. Allows you to swap out the images by clicking.
  4. You can reorder remove or hide images.

Here are a few examples I churned out without much though while testing this:

The DS106 Effect

It is great to get the quality of feedback and suggestion from a blogger I've read for years. The whole ds106 network is incredibly supportive even before the course has started. I started riffing off Alan's idea and was pushed and encouraged to improve something that started as a slightly pointless exercise to be come almost useful. This reinforces, for me, the power of blogging and commenting in learning. I've spend a few hours polishing something, learning as I went due to the community effect. I'd already had some of this in ds106 related posts. The current exchange has been particularly powerful becasue it was not just a well done, but a you could do this

Once I go back to work, tomorrow, I am not sure how much of ds106 I'll be able to keep up with as even before the spring course there is a fair flood of posts, but I'll give it a fair try.

I'll also be thinking a bit harder about how I comment on pupil blogs, too often it is easy to go for well doen and leave it at that.

How it Works

A mix of jquery, php & jQuery UI.

Part of the ds106 ethic seem to be to explain how something is done so that others can learn from it. My coding will not stand much of a critical eye, I am no programmer, but some folk might find this interesting or even useful.

The Quotes API will send json, but although that worked in desktop test I couldn't get it working on the web due to cross domin problems, I tried setting it to jsonp and that brought it in but I got errors trying to parse it with jQuery. Knowing very little about this stuff I side stepped it by pulling the json in with php so I could get that with jQuery's ajax stuff. Any jQuery/Javascript (and css) is all on the one page and you can have a look if you are interested by viewing the source of Visualize That Quote. It is not a pretty sight, as my method of coding is guess and check and google and guess and check. I have a tendency just to get things going and then push on.

This quote is put on the page, next javascript strips out all of the punctuation using:
str=str.replace( /[^a-zA-Z ]/g, '').replace( /ss+/g, ' ' );
Which I got from How can I strip all punctuation from a string in JavaScript using regex? – Stack Overflow. The script then pulls in html to show random flickr image via a php file which uses phpFlickr: randomFlickr you can see the code with some notes. I am recycling this from elsewhere (A flickr CC search toy). One the javascript has the code it puts it on the page.

More javascript swaps out the pictures for others when they are clicked.jQuery makes that pretty simple. jQuery UI handles all the dragging:

$("#flickr").sortable({
		handle: '.drag',
		revert: true
		    });

Which is pretty simple. I just copied that from the jQuery UI site.

Most of the other things are deal with my toggling their visibility with jQuery again: $('.attribution').toggle(); in this case this hides or shows the attribution for all the pictures, these are in a span with the css class .attribution.

How it could be better

  1. The flickr search could return json rather than html, this would give a better logic to building the set of images. I'd need to learn how to produce json with php and to process this with jQuery.
  2. Most of the work is done with simple functions, these are called from hard coded onclicks, the more common way to do this with jQuery seems to ad these with jQuery when the pages is loaded.
  3. Rather than expect users to take manual screenshots it should be possible to created composite images with the attribution and optionally the text stampled on. I've done a little of this sort of thing before (the stamp function of A flickr CC search toy) but this would streach me and google a bit.
  4. Alternativly an embed code that would embed a wee set of thumbnail pics and link to a full viewing of the creation. In both this and the last case I'd need to figure out what to do if a user reorders the images. In this case I might need a database.

Given the return to work tomorrow, all the fun I'll have on ds106 and Colin Maxwell's Ed Tech Creative Collective I am not sure if I'll get to this any time soon, but I've had a great time with this so far, if you are part of ds106 I hop you finf the assignment useful, I am very open to more ideas and suggestions.

Posted on
by

Another positive of being an airhead was that one or two folk noticed my site was down.

tombarrett
tombarrett

@johnjohnston Flickr CC is down
Thu Dec 02 17:26:13 +0000 2010 from TweetDeck captured: Sun, 05 Dec 10 18:14:33 +0000

And when it came back, in particular A flickr CC search toy, tombarrett tweeted it again with the usual effect, including this one:

xlearn
xlearn

@johnjohnston @tombarrett looks good! Have you seen http://bit.ly/hevGEF It’s what we use in FE and HE.
Sat Dec 04 08:35:34 +0000 2010 from Echofon captured: Sun, 05 Dec 10 18:16:31 +0000

Silverlining

I think I had seen Xpert Attribution tool before but it was not at the front of my mind. Looking at it reminded me of the nice way they add attribution by padding the image at the bottom rather than the way I was doing it (stamping over the image). I had tried to work out how to pad an image before but failed. This morning I spent a wee bit of time digging around the PHP: Function Reference and managed to figure out a couple of things, padding the image, and wrapping the text when it is too wide for the image.

Like the rest of A flickr CC search toy the code is surely pretty horrible, but it seems to work.

I also looked over the How do I properly attribute a Creative Commons licensed work? on the FFAQ – CC Wiki again just to make sure I am keeping within the guidelines.

Stamp icons

THe other thing that I’ve changes is to add a 3rd size to the stamped images. I’d avoided the small size as the attribution rarely fitted on the images, now I am padding them they do not present the problem.

Using the stamped image has the advantage of the attribution sticking to the image where ever it goes and as far as online use goes keeping the image under your control an avoilding problems if a user deletes their image when you hot link to flickr.

As always I am interested in any suggested improvements I can make to A flickr CC search toy the idea is still to provide pupils a practical way to use and attribute Creative Commons images from flickr.

Posted on
by

I saw a tweet mentioning me and the Flickr Search and Stamp for the iPod touch project on Friday. Clicking the link took me to Searching for CC images – SHea iPod Touch Project a post on Ian Guest’s posterous about:

a year long project between two schools, one in the London area and the other in Yorkshire. Students in two classes will be loaned an iPod Touch, for use both in school and at home.

The post contains a youtube video of how to use the Flickr Search and Stamp on an iPod touch and the blog has a lot of other interesting iPod Touch educational information.

I had mentioned this tool in a blog post and added it to the Interesting Ways to use an iPod Touch in the Classroom collaborative google presentation but have not blogged about it here..

The idea was to get around some copyright issues for children searching for images to create with on an ipod touch. Ideally children would save a photo, figure to the attribution and edit the photo to add this. That can be quite difficult and time consuming on an iPod touch so I though up this workaround. It searches flickr, only returning images that can be used and edited under a cc license, it then will produce an image with the attribution stamped onto it in the same way as my flickr CC search toy.

Flickr cc attribution

It is based on the iPod Touch Poems webapp I knocked together and has quite a few rough edges. I am sure I could improve the performance, interface & a lot more but it seems to work.

Here is Ian’s video, which should give you an idea of how the app works:

I’ve added a link from the page/Web app to the video to act as in app help so many thanks Ian for this. You can also get an idea of it the app work in this Simulator.

I’d appreciate any feedback on using the app, especially in class and ideas for improving it.

Posted on
by

 

ipod_Map_comics

As a bit of a google maps enthusiast I love Tom Barrett’s Maths Maps ideas. It looks to me like a nice way to show some ‘real’ application of maths in an engaging way.

I am still supporting/interfering with an ipod touch project (site gone but not forgotten on the Internet archive). This gave me the excuse a few weekends ago to spend some time messing about with the jQTouch — jQuery plugin which simplifies developing webpages for mobile devices. I am experimenting with building some sort of base site/web app for the touch.

One of the nice things about the iPod Touch is that you can add webpages as ‘applications’ to your home screen. Apple provide a way which jQTouch supports of giving a webpage an icon the idea with the site I am working on, the iPod Playground, is that it should provide an easy way to present links etc to the children this avoids typing long urls into the touch, the webpage could be edited

A couple of weeks ago I went over to Glencairn to give the maps a try out. The task I gave the pupils was presented on one of the ‘pages’ of a jQTouch page. Based on one of Tom’s shape problems, the children visited the Jardin du Luxembourg and collected screenshots of different 2D shapes, these were then built into Comics with Comic Touch. We encouraged the children to work in pairs to collect shapes, one child to keep the instructions open the other to click on the link to the map. Then bump the images from the image gatherer to the one with the instructions on his/her screen. The lesson seemed to go pretty well the children accessing the maps, taking pictures and creating comics with out a problem.

I am hoping to get the children to try a Street View problem soon. The Slides from flickr show some of the screens of the jQTouch webpage and a couple of street view images on the touch.

Creating the Tasks

The jQtouch setup is very easy to work with, everything in a ‘site’ is really one page, jQtouch provides a nice standard interface, navigation and animation for that navigation.

It took me a while to figure out how to link to the maps so that I dropped a pin where I wanted it and that pin would have a name on it using the Name and the location in the query seems to work:
Street View Shapes 1

Weeorgangeguy

You need to have a pin on the map to get street view to work. On the iPod touch or iPhone you click on the Wee Orange Guy to switch to street view. As an aside I think street view on a browser uses flash, obviously not on the iPod but it is a very smooth experience.

Apple provide quite a few nice tricks to help web app development. You can set an icon for your webpage, so that if folk add it to their home screen it looks like a ‘real’ app. You can also set a splash screen image which will show until the page has loaded when opened as a web app. I have a wee problem with the Flickr Lunes site I blogged about recently if I set: to run in full screen users cannot hold on an image to copy it to their photos, pretty much killing the functionality of the app, so I have had to lose the splash screen. I’ve been working on an ipod/phone version of my A flickr CC search toy called Flickr Search and Stamp this just lets you stamp a flickr photo with attribution. Like Flickr Lunes it only find photos you are allowed to alter so should keep you on the right side of the copyright fairy.

Posted on
by

Recently I’ve been thinking about ipod touches quite a bit. As well as giving some support to the Glencairn ipod project and being the middle man for a wee Consolarium trial of TapTale which will start soon, I am just back from Oldham and Blackpool CLC’s iPodTouch Conference.

The conference was a great success and there is a lot of interesting chatter on the ning site and on Twitter #ipod2010

Last weekend I started playing with an idea for a wee web app. The idea is to provide an interface for searching flickr and creating images combining flickr photos and text. Using only photos that can be adapted and incorporating attribution.

shark_touch_poem

As a sort of proof of concept I made a web app that makes lunes. A Lune is a fixed-form variant haiku created for the English language. It has three words on the first line, five on the second and three on the third. I’ve used lune writing as a classroom activity on several occasions, they are simple and fun to write. (Lune (poetry) – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)

The web app works like this:

Touch Poem Screens

  1. Pupils load the webpage int oSafari on their ipods and type in a search.
  2. The app retrieves and displays a list of creative commons photos that you are allowed to make derivations of.
  3. Pupils select a photo by clicking on it. This opens the photo with a 3 line form over it.
  4. Pupils type in poem and click Go.
  5. The image and text is sent to the server where it is stamped with the text and attribution and sent back to browser.
  6. Pupil presses on image, save dialog opens and image can be saved to photos.

I am using the phpFlickr to search and GD to stamp the photos

I tried the app out with the Glencairn primary six class on tuesday, we then bumped the photos to my phone, transferred them to a mac and added voice in iMovie: Animal Lunes, all in 90 minutes.

I though the app ran fairly smoothly except for quotes ’ which came back escaped with a slash ’, some text ran off the pictures and the problem with not being able to fix spelling mistakes. I should be able to fix the escapes and hopefully alter the font size to suit the picture width.

Of course the whole thing was put together in an afternoon, the code is rough and the interface rougher. The plan might be to make it a bit more ajaxy and add a few different poem types, proper haiku, kennngs, Cinquains etc. I am wondering if it would be worthwhile developing? Is it too much of a one off to be really useful? I’d love to know what you think?

You can see the webpage in a quick and dirty Lunes Simulator or directly Flickr Lunes.

Posted on
by

A while back I made a simple flickr search tool this is not as slick as some of the beautiful search tools out there but it was designed for pupils to use to get images to embed into their blogs and to create the attribution, clicking on a thumbnail gives this:

Flickr Ccstamp

Which has a text box with the html code to embed the image and attribution, you can choose to align left of right and to use small or medium images.

The tool if far from perfect an needs quite a lot of work but it has proved useful to quite a few folk and I believe used in glow training by LTS. Recently at the suggestion of a fellow ADE I added a more somber style to the rather bright colours I had used (a link at the top right of the page toggles the styles and sets a cookie to remeber your preferences).

At the Scottish Learning festival I was delighted to see Neil Winton‘s pupils using my tool and working with the images. This gave rise to the thought that it might be useful to create images that could be used without the embed code that show attribution. I’ve added a feature, above you can see stamp medium and stamp original links. Clicking on these will produce an image with the attribution stamped on.

Stamped by flickr cc
my crop

So I am wondering would this be useful in your class and two, is this legal (stamping a No Derivs photo? ) and is the wording (Flickr photo by name – license) and I would appreciate your comments on both of these questions.