Image+Sharing

Individual images can be shared through many of the programs mentioned in this workshop, however sharing a large number of images is better done through a site that is designed for that purpose. Most photo sharing sites are set up for social value, thus encouraging a level of interaction that is not always suited to educational use. Educators have duty of care responsibilities that have to be considered so need a site that can operate in a manner which will satisfy our privacy concerns and allow comments to engage in a collaborative space.

**Flickr** is a well used and well respected photo depository. It is currently home to over 5 billion images so it is well equiped to handle any number of photos your school may wish to upload, which can be done in bulk to save time. Most people who leave their photos open to the public but at school we have a duty to protect the privacy of our student. This can easily be done by creating a group with access limited to member of that group - which is your students or students from another school that you are collaborating on a group project with. HDICWT has been set up as a private group for this workshop - sign into Flickr, select the groups tab and select HDICWT. In a school situation this could possibly be done with a single class sign in. Setting up a private Flickr group was certainly quite fiddly and time consuming but once set up it all works very smoothly. Anyone accessing your group space will need a yahoo account. If the price to pay for using the excellent resources owned by Yahoo and Google is the time to create a free sign up then that is worth the effort. A good example of a Flickr group is the **ISTE 2010 Where's the Bear? contest**.

Aside from the uses we have explored here, there is an amazing variety of web 2 sites that access images from Flickr and tweak them into new functionality. This is the good side of hacking - go to **my Delicious site** and select the Flickr tag or Google Flickr and scroll down past the official Flickr sites to browse what creative people have done.

There are a number of other smaller photo depository sites but they lack the privacy options that Flickr allows. **Photobucket** would be the closest and is worth comparing.

Google's **Picasa** is also worthy of consideration. It a software download, not Web 2, but it but it does give users the capacity to share images online through **Picasa web albums**.