Technology Adventure Unit Two

Unit two: Images
2/21-3/6

We take a lot of photos down here and we should show them off! The Library uploads photos to Flickr for people to look at, and photos will be great to share with patrons once we have Drupal running.

Play at Flickr: Check your e-mail for the login and password.

From this page, you can view our photostream, see what our contacts have uploaded and explore. There’s a lot you can do with Flickr, socially and sharing, but we’ll stick to the basics.

Click on “Your Photostream” to see all of the Library’s photos. Photo sets, specific albums, are along the right side. Explore! Use tags on individual photo pages to see more with the same tag. You can browse the Library’s collection like that, or the entire Flickr site. You can also explore groups, where people share their photos on a particular theme.

Now let’s practice uploading. Take a photo during a program or around the Library, or just choose one of our recent photos saved on the G drive. Click on the Flickr logo to get back home, then click on Upload Photos on the right side and select your photo.

All photos from our department are tagged opplfamily so that they appear on the Hi Kids page and all Library photos are tagged “oak park public library” (with quotes to keep the phrase together). Add other tags as necessary. Add the photo to the correct set. Give the photo a title and, optionally, a description. Click save and admire your work. (Optionally: Click the ticky box to make this photo private and viewable only to people logged into the OPPL account.)

Make your own book cover: Now try to make your own picture to upload at the blog. Pictures add interest to blog posts and should be used often. We’ll twist the internet album cover meme and turn it into a book cover.

Go to Wiki Random
The random Wikipedia article you get is your pseudonym.

Go to Quotations Page
The last four or five words of the very last quote on the page is the title of your book.

Go to Flickr Explore
From the drop down, select the month of your last birthday. Click on your birthday on the resulting calendar and click on the third image to be your cover image. Choose Actions, view all sizes. Right click on the image and save it to your computer. The Medium size is probably the easiest to work with. (If this photo is unavailable for download, you can choose another.)

Use a graphics program like Paint.net (on our computers) or Picnik (online program) to put it all together. In Paint, explore the tool descriptions to learn about all the options. Open the photo you want used. Crop it to be approximately book cover proportioned. Add text with the T on the sidebar, choose your font, click where you want to type, and enter it in. Use the compass like cursor under the text to move it around.

Picnik walks you through a lot of the options, plus gives fun extras you can add to your images and lets you save to the computer or your favorite social networking site. Crop your photo under Edit, and add text under Create. I find it more intuitive than Paint, but your mileage may vary. :)

Get creative! See samples at Flickr's Cover Meme tag.

Create a new post in blogger, upload your book cover and tell us about your adventures with images. Did you have any problems? Did you find anything cool at Flickr you want to share? How can we use Flickr more, or image generators and graphics programs like this? What about Flickr applications like Color Fields, You Gotta See This or Montagr? Any other neat ones you found?

Don’t forget to tag/label your post with unit two. You have two weeks, until March 6, to get your post up and comment on some other posts. Have fun!