Organizing

Use tags, titles, and descriptions to make your photos easier to find.

As your account starts to accumulate photos, it may become impossible to locate what you are searching for unless you use Flickr's organising features. To make your photos findable, be sure to accurately annotate your images using the Title and Description fields. Doing so will not only make it easier for you to search through your photo stream later on, but it will also help other people find your photos through Flickr's powerful search tools and tag-based navigation system.

Each of the uploading tools described above allows you to add a title to your photo at the same time as you upload it. Keep in mind that when you take a photo, your camera gives it a name — perhaps something like img_24. If you don't change this name, Flickr will use it as the title. Needless to say, titles like this are not very useful. You are free to title your photos in whatever way you wish; if you browse through photos on Flickr, you'll quickly see a wide range of styles and approaches, from humorous to descriptive. (In fact, there is a Flickr group devoted to photos with clever titles that has over 10,000 entries.)

The description field lets you add text limited hypertext to your photos. If you don't take the time to provide good descriptions of your Flickr photos, you're missing an opportunity to tell your organisation's story. Take for example the compelling descriptions on Pearl Children Care Center's photo set.

Tagging is very important in Flickr because it forms the basis of Flickr's powerful search features. Tags are keywords that help describe a photo — both the type of image and its contents. Tagging your photos in Flickr will provide the easiest way to search and find particular photos in your photo stream as well as help you connect people with similar interests to yours. While the uploading tools offer tagging features, you can also add tags later by clicking the "Add a Tag" link on the photo page. Depending on how you set your privacy settings, other people may also add tags to your photos, making it a communal activity.

Last month, Flickr launched a pilot project with the Library of Congress called The Commons that invited community members to tag selected photos from the Library of Congress archive in order to increase exposure to the Library's content and draw on community knowledge to enhance the catalogues, making them, in the words of the Flickr Blog, "easier and richer to search."

Tagging is not the only way you can add information to photos, however. Flickr also offers a nifty "Notes" feature that allows you to add text to the photo itself. This can be useful for instructional purposes or for documentation (for example, capturing details or notes from meetings). The possibilities are endless.

Use sets, collections, and archives to keep your photos organised.

Sets are a way to organise your photos into smaller groups of photos with a common theme, story, or feeling. Collections are made of sets. For example, the Library of Congress project has several sets, including News of 1910 and 1930s-40s in Color. Both of these sets are part of the Library's Pilot collection. Likewise, the American Cancer Society organises its sets are organised by event.

There's no one right or wrong way to organise your photos into sets or collections. Create an organizing framework that will be easy to follow, and that will help you and others retrieve or browse photos easily. Flickr's upload tools let you create sets during the uploading process, and you can use the Organiser tool in Flickr to create, edit, or delete sets and collections anytime. The Flickr FAQ offers good tutorials on how to use the organiser to create sets and collections.

Once you've annotated your photos and added tags to them, you'll find Flickr's Search My Photos feature to be a powerful tool for zeroing in on what you're looking for. If that fails, sets may also help you locate photos. Your Flickr archive (found in the "You" tab on your profile page) will also let you explore your collection using dates, as Flickr offers the option to automatically add the date a photo was taken and uploaded.

Use the Mapping feature to show where your photos were taken and to find photos of places near you.

Flickr allows you to literally put your photos on a map — or search public photos based on location — using geotags consisting of the latitude and longitude codes for where the photo was taken. "Geotagging puts a face to a map where something is happening," said Champ. "Where this becomes very interesting is to go to the public Flickr map and start searching a city or location you plan to visit. You can see photos and do advanced research on a trip. For nonprofits, we have agencies and nonprofits post-Katrina or even post-Tsunami sharing photos with geocodes to show the impact of their programs or work."

Be careful about what geographic information you show in public. For example, if you are posting photos of a women's shelter for domestic violence victims, you obviously would not want to share the location information with just anyone. A good rule of thumb is to provide geotags for those photos for which you'd feel comfortable sharing the physical address.

You can set a default privacy level for any photos you add to the map, and you can change the location privacy per photo as well. To change the settings on a photo, double-click it in Organizr, linked to from your photo page. Click the Location tab and you'll find the privacy setting, as well as the latitude and longitude of your photo. Flickr's Mapping Features FAQ will bring you up to speed pretty quickly, and if you're a visual learner, check out its Map Screencast 1 and Map Screencast 2. There's even a Flickr Geotagging Group devoted to the topic.