The Brooklyn Museum have just joined the Commons on Flickr and some of the material they’ve released is spectacular. Amongst the highlights are some amazing lantern slides of Egypt as well as colourised photographs from the Paris Exposition in 1900. Some of the colourised images are quite surreal.
Brookyln have also released some of them at 3000 pixel and higher resolutions – asking re-users of these images to contact them to tell them whether this extra high resolution is useful. (I immediately thought that it might be fun to Photoshop in some Indiana Jones images into some of the Egypt images).
Flickr is already flagging that there will be many more contributors to the Commons coming very soon and that there will be some new features – an internal Commons search – as well as greater promotion of the Commons across Flickr. The addition of Brooklyn also seems to have solved the problem of the Commons needing a separate account – Brooklyn have sensibly merged their Commons images into their already very successful Flickr presence.
Back at the Powerhouse we’ve just uploaded our 500th image. This latest batch includes some lovely shots of the Sydney Observatory which is celebrating its 150th anniversary this year. There are also more shots of old Sydney, and the Tyrrell Today group is now starting to fill up with complimentary contemporary shots of the Tyrrell locations takne by a diverse range of other Flickr users.
And two other things, if you search Flickr regularly then you will love CompFight. It is a really nifty quick search of Flickr with various options for Creative Commons images and (un)Safe Search that leverages the Flickr API.
If you want the more ‘wow’ but far less practical search of Flickr then this 3D globe-style search from Germany, Tag Galaxy, is pretty amusing – especially on a fast connection.
One reply on “Brooklyn joins the Commons, we hit the 500 mark”
Thanks for posting, Seb. The folks at Flickr were really great about allowing us to use the original account. This was a primary concern of ours – to not split the content or the community that we’d already grown. It took a lot of dev work from Flickr’s side, but we really appreciated that effort and it meant a lot to us that we could do it this way. Thanks you awesome Flickr peeps: George, Dan, Jude and Paul!!