Photosharing Thing

I don't recall ever getting a question about photo sharing specifically, but I do get questions from patrons asking for pictures. The most recent one needed to print some electoral maps from recent elections. Flickr and other photosharing sites are good options for getting these sorts of images. At the time, the student who needed the pictures was just sifting through a google image search. For this exercise, I searched Flickr using the same search terms she had used, and I was more satisfied with those results than what Google provided. I can also see the library staff using these photosharing tools to find images for programming. I frequently help our children's librarian prepare for storytime or other programs by printing pictures to display around the meeting room (for instance, arctic animals for a storytime on that theme). Photosharing sites would be a good place to look for these images- and I've found more results that fit what I'm looking for. Sometimes things pop up in Google searches that have nothing to do with what I'm looking for. Flickr seems to be a bit more concise.

On a more personal note, I like the "groups" feature that Flickr offers. Simple search engines don't offer tools like this. I searched 'arctic animals" and the site suggested the Animal Planet group. I love animals and would be very content to sit here and look through all 460,000 images, but I think that would be considered off task.