Would you believe that three billion photographs have been uploaded to Flickr? And not all by me!

Impressive.

Then you hear that Facebook has had ten billion photographs uploaded.

For me this shows the huge potential of these online sites for finding out about places and stuff.

Look at the search results for Gloucester for example. Want to find out what a place looks like? Need to know about a piece of technology? With three billion photographs you will probably find it. As photographs are tagged, it is possible to find images very quickly as unlike putting photographs into a single category, tagging allows it to be placed in multiple categories. These images have been tagged with Gloucester.

Flickr also has the potential to be faster than news sites for images.

I saw pictures of a gas explosion in Bath on Flickr, before the news had even made the BBC. The pier fire in Weston-super-Mare was also captured on Flickr.

Also what is nice with Flickr is that a lot of people (including me) licence our photographs under Creative Commons which means that you and your learners can use them (legally) in presentations and teaching and learning. Now unlike Google Image Search which (though indexes Flickr) most of the images found there, are either copyrighted or too small. A lot of images on Flickr are at full resolution, which work well not just in PowerPoint but also for printing.

Another feature of Flickr is the community and social networking side. You can comment on people’s photographs and in some cases add notes.

If you haven’t checked Flickr out, have a look.