Flickr’s Greatly Improved Creative Commons Search Function
17 05 2006Flickr just upgraded from Beta to Gamma so I thought it was time to check their search function out in the new version. Low and behold, my wish for a better way to search only Creative Commons licensed images is there: 
Now when directing students to the various legally re-usable sources for image on the web I can start with Flick and ensure that they can easily find only images with the right licenses! Spiffy!
Tama, this feature is very welcome in my view although the frustrating thing is that in South Australia R-12 schools, Flickr is blocked by our internet filter. So, although I would really like to model and insist on use of CC and public domain images in student work, the barriers posed by the filter make things really hard.
Filtering has always struck me as a painfully inexact science, atlhough I guess
with any photosharing website there is the danger that people will share material not well suited for younger people. That said, I fear that blocking something like Flickr would push students into using whatever materails they can find … which is probably not explictly intended for reuse!
(And along the way somewhere we need to keep in mind that what’s being blocked at school is being accessed at home anyway so do teachers have some sort of obligation to embed a critical awareness of searching material when anything might turn up? So many difficult questions…)
Dear Tama,
I built something to do this kind of Creative Commons search last year (FlickrLilli), but it got lost in the morass of the internet. It does pretty much what Flickr’s new search does (and did before Christmas :), but is a bit snappier and more compact, plus the previews are nice, it’s easy to download the full-size image, and I provide a summary you can cut and paste into documents where you use the image.
Elliot