Now sharing 890 Flickr Photos via Creative Commons and saidia.org

After the worrying discussion of the Facebook Purge over the weekend (in case you missed it, I urged my activist friends to stop using Facebook for their organizing – it’s too risky), I thought I’d turn to a more positive side of Social Media – how it’s made sharing photos so fun and easy.

Flickr has been a great resource for me over the years to share my photos online – both private photos with friends/family and photos I want to share publicly – either because they are related to my work or because I am simply proud of them and want to encourage others to use them. Today I’ve made 890 of them public – let me know if you find them useful.

Thanks to the Flickr API and clever programmers, Flickr photos (and videos) can be used in a variety of interesting ways. For example, the Flickr Gallery plugin for WordPress provides simple “shortcodes” that let blog authors easily dropping galleries and pictures into any page or post, like at the top of this post or the photos page. Another is the pretty background images on saidia.org, which are provided by the WP Flickr Background plugin.

Flickr also has other benefits  that are worth mentioning. Flickr makes it really easy to publish photos under a Creative Commons license, which in turn makes it really easy for other people to use your content. This, combined with the API, is golden.

My most widely used photo, surprisingly, is one I took of a very common scene in Seattle – the Wenatchee ferry heading to Bainbridge Island.