Flickr and other photo-sharing sites

I'm a regular user of one of the other sites mentioned in the blog post, Snapfish. I have relatives that live overseas, and a very cool (and convenient) gift for Mothers' Day, birthdays, etc, is to upload a few images and have them printed up on a calendar or a mug or some other fun surface.

We've also ended up using Snapfish to back up all of our family photos. Originally I tried to use Flickr for that, but once you get past a certain number of photos you need to pay $25 a year for a premium plan.

I've used Flickr in the past as a personal research tool. If I'm thinking of going somewhere on holidays, or trying to decide between two hotels to stay at, a quick Flickr search will often show you what other people who have previously gone to places think of it. For example if I was after a nice, peaceful vacation, I'd look for the spot that has lots of pictures of the beach and the sunset over the place that has mostly pictures of hiking and extreme sports. Or if I typed in the name of a hotel and saw that people had taken the time to take and upload pictures of a mouldy bathroom, I might think twice about staying there.

The topic of creative commons is an interesting one as it relates to Queensland libraries. I was once told by someone in the know that if something was published for the first time on a Queensland Government website (like a year 3 student's essay, for example) the copyright automatically went to to the Queensland Government. I don't know whether this is true, but if so this presents another interesting issue for the use of sites like Flickr. I would imagine that it would be difficult to make library resources available on Flickr when the copyright issues are considered.