Re: Suggestion: integration with Flickr
One of the great growth areas in biological recording is, no doubt, Flickr. I see a lot of potential for Indicia to be able to exploit Flickr's popularity as a place to post wildlife photos and have them id'd.
Look at these for instance:
http://www.flickr.com/groups/spidersofukandeire/
http://www.flickr.com/groups/70907497@N00/ (click on the "Discussion" link for the full list)
Nearly all of the messages in those groups are people asking for ids. Photographers are obviously very interested in biological recording, not just photography. This was mentioned to me by one of our county recorders. He's noticed a surge in enquiries, mainly from curious digital photographers. I've long been of the opinion that digital photography is the new collecting. At the very least, it's a gateway for interested people to get into recording. We should be engaging with this community.
So, the question is, how do we exploit Flickr?
To begin with, why not allow users to be able to pull in, or link, images and metadata from their Flickr accounts? The camera metadata must contain lots of useful info that could auto-populate Indicia fields; e.g., geo-tags, dates, times, etc. Flickr's "machine tags" could also be exploited. After that, how about using Indicia as a means of pushing photos onto Flickr and populating (machine) tags and other metadata? Seems like Indicia and Flickr could share a beautiful, symbiotic, relationship.
The Flickr API is extensive and well documented, so I don't think it should be too hard to get some sort of integration going.
Digital Development Manager | Field Studies Council
http://www.field-studies-council.org | https://twitter.com/charlesroper | https://twitter.com/fsc_digital