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The 2008 Summer Reading photo pool at flickr is growing by leaps and bounds. Tons of great photos of programs, activities, displays and more. Like this great photo from the Newport (OR) Public Library. Take a look at the pool for some fun ideas. And please add your photos too!

p.s. Don’t forget to check out the news on the Summer Reading blog.

How’d I forget flickrCC in the last post? This is another terrific flickr search tool that just searches for Creative Commons licensed flickr photos and has some really handy editing features.

• Search for a keyword and you get a nice mosaic of thumbnails from flickr.
• Pick the one you want and you can select which size you want view. (Larger images tend to bleed off to the right on smaller monitors.)
• My favorite feature is “in house” editing. This gives you a screen where you can add credits to the picture, additional text, a border and more.
• When you’re all done, right click and save to your hard drive or copy and pop it right into your presentation software.

(reminded of this via HeyJude)

Do you use flickr to find photos for presentations, reports and projects? It’s truly a treasure trove of photos, images and screenshots.

You can search for images of types of objects (apples, sailboats, panda bears) or specific places (Mt. Everest, Iguazu Falls) and even photos that evoke a certain emotion or concept (cheerful, speak no evil).

And by using flickr’s advanced searching option and limiting to Creative Commons licensed photos, you’ll find images that you can use without copyright worries.

But if you use flickr for this sort of search often, you’ll soon get tired of plowing through tons of images and downloading photos one by one. This is where some 3rd party tools come in handy.

• flickrstorm - Enter search terms to retrieve photos matching that term. In addition, flickrstorm retrieves a set of related photos as well. Best of all, you can save individual photos to a “photo tray” and download them all to your computer at one go. This is a great time saver. (via Librarian in Black)
• PicLens - This handy browser add-on lets you fly through a set of photos and zoom in on the one’s that look interesting. You’ll still need to select each photo individually for download, but you can preview hundreds of photos in a flash. Works with YouTube, Picasa, Photobucket and other image rich web sites. (via TheShiftedLibrarian)

flickr has been hinting at including video for a while now and now it’s there. I haven’t uploaded anything yet, but it  looks as easy as uploading photos. Check out  flickr’s blog post on the new service and their FAQ page as well.

Videos can be a max of 90 seconds  and no more than 150 MB.  Video upload is available to Pro members, though anyone can view video content. I like flickr’s description of video as being a “long photo”.  I like that they’re trying something new that members have asked for and that they’re not quite sure how it will work or where it will go. Trusting their community, way to go flickr!

I’m so glad I’ve taken some short videos this week, I’m going to see if I can upload something.

(via Angela at Melange)

Ever wondered how to add a flickr slideshow to your website? Or a YouTube video? Or a PowerPoint slideshow? Check out this great article by Aaron Schmidt: Widgets and Widgetry for Librarians: Copy, Paste, and Relax in MultiMedia & Internet@Schools (Posted Mar 1, 2008)

Widgets pull in updated content, making your web site less static (and less boring?)

Adding a widget is easy. Usually just a short form to fill out and then a snippet of code to copy and paste to your website. You really don’t have to know anything about the code. (Though you do need to be able to edit your web pages.)

With widgets you can have your del.icio.us bookmark links updating on your page, the most recent YouTube videos, photos from your flickr account, books you’re recommending via LibraryThing and so much more.

If you want to see a whole bunch of flickr photo widgets in action, check out my flickr slide show examples page.

Go get widgety!

Thanks to Jenny Levine, The Shifted Librarian, for posting so many great photos of DOK - Library Concept Center in Delft, The Netherlands (aka the Delft Public Library).

What a trip it was to spin through these late last night in her flickr account. My head is still spinning.

Click on the slide set below to see a few of the pictures, but be sure to go directly to Jenny’s flickr account to see the whole thing. It looks like an absolutely amazing place - both architecturally and in the services offered. What fun! Field trip anyone?

Full set of photos at flickr