Blog: Flickr

Flickr's Release of "Find Your Friends" Allows Organizations to Build their Network Faster and Be Smarter Communicators

Now it's easy to find and talk to "your friends" on Flickr. On March 31st Flickr opened up a new tool that allows people search their Yahoo!, Gmail, and Hotmail address books to find Flickr users with those email addresses. This really blows open the communications windows for organizations that host photos on Flickr and have large email lists of friends and supporters.

Organizations can now build relationships on Flickr with the same
people they send emails and e-newsletters to. This is a big step. I
have seen and helped a lot of nonprofits start using Flickr as a
community outreach tool, but aside from staking a presence and
regularly posting photos that are integrated with blog posts,
communication directors haven't really known what to do with the
service.

All they have to do to further connect with these people - and engage in a two way dialog with them - is to do a large address book import in to Google from their mail program and go to work. It's that easy with a CSV file dump (Comma Separated Values), which Google supports.

Flickr has a ton of great communications features - like commenting on photos, tagging, friending, etc - that organizations and supporters can now use to simply talk to each other. For many organizations, this may well be the very first time they get to see the faces of their supporters. 

This is a great way for organizations to embrace pull style communications (i.e. let supporters pull in their pictures rather than always pushing them out to them). Who knows, maybe organizations will start subscribing in mass to their supporters' feeds to see what they're posting and glean information about them this way. It will give them a very personal window into their membership base. I think this is where the real magic will happen. Maybe even just doing some lightweight automated text analysis based on tags will generate some great information and low lying fruit. 

Module Lets You Upload Photos to Your Site and Flickr at the Same Time

Wouldn’t it be cool if you could upload as many images as you’d like to your site without worrying about your bandwidth? Or even better, if you could automatically share the images you upload to your site with an image sharing service like Flickr, and then have these photos displayed on your website but hosted on Flickr? 

That’s exactly what we did last week for the Stand Up Speak Out campaign. Using Drupal and the Flickr API, I created a small Drupal module called Flickrup that does this – all you have to do is enable it and configure it. It helped us easily display photos from many of the thousands of events that took place around the world on their individual event webpages. Here’s what it looks like:

Here’s what the module can do:

• Upload images to your Flickr account and link them to specific content
• Automatically display images along with your website content
• Define a global tag for all your uploaded images
• Define tags per content types, which lets you automatically tag images using node parameters and location data if its available (for example, you can tag all images with 'yoursitename' event[nid] country)
• Add additional custom tags for each upload

Here’s how it works:

• Uses phpFlickr for Flickr integration and automatic uploading 
• Uploads images first to your server and then to Flickr, and gives you the option of removing local files after they've been sent to Flickr
• Automatically tags your pictures for your specific content on your website, which allows appropriate images to be retrieved and displayed on the appropriate pages (this is optional)

And it works! Thousands of photographs were uploaded last week during the Stand Up Speak Out campaign.

Below I’ll walk you through using the Flickrup module step by step.

Two Widgets We Used to Show Off Photos on StandAgainstPoverty.org

At the height of the UN Millennium Campaign's Stand Up Speak Out campaign last week, a ton of photos were uploaded to StandAgainstPoverty.org in just one day. So many in fact, that at least one photo from the campaign’s account made it into the photos featured on Flickr under “everyone’s photos.” That’s hard to do and shows the fast rate people were uploading photos through the Flickrup module that Jose built (more on that later in the week).

With so many photos being uploaded and with so many of these photos containing important metadata like the location where the photos were taken, we really wanted to display the photos in an organized way that took advantage of all available data. So we started brainstorming. 

Flickr.com lets you make a Flickr map of your photos, but photos can only be mapped if they've been geotagged using a special machine tag that includes latitude and longitude of where the picture was taken.  This is limiting, and unless you do the geocoding yourself (which can be a little hairy but not too bad), you need a way to geocode the pictures when pulling them back out of Flickr. With such a fast paced campaign like this one, we wanted to use a more straightforward approach. 

That’s when Trippermap came in. Trippermap is a flash widget that gets around the need to tag your photos with latitude and longitude. If there are other location tags on a photo like the name of a country, city, and state or a country and state/province, then Trippermap uses this information to geocode the photo itself and place it on a flash map that you can then embed in your site.  Check out this one from the Stand Up Speak Out campaign:

Stand Up Speak Out Campaign Breaks It’s Own World Record

I’d like to send a big congratulations over to the UN Millennium Campaign and especially to everyone who worked on and participated in the Stand Up Speak Out campaign. A whopping 38.8 million people in 110 different countries took action yesterday and Wednesday to show their support to end poverty! Not only did they break their own Guinness World Record for the number of people to stand up to demand action on poverty, but they surpassed the record by 15 million people. 

As people were taking action around the world, they were also organizing events and posting updates online at StandAgainstPoverty.org, a Drupal website we worked on with Jason Wojciechowski and his team at the UN Millennium Campaign. The website turned into a great showcase of the success of the events taking place around the world. In total, people posted information about 5,579 different events they were hosting. 

They posted even more photos – more than 6,300 photos of events were uploaded to the campaign’s Flickr account as of 2:00 pm today. Most of these photos were uploaded through the Flickup module, a module we developed and installed on the site to let people upload photos to a node in Drupal and at the same time tag photos with an associated ID. This let us pull photos that are on Flickr back to StandAgainstPoverty.org and display them there. We decided to show them off in this slideshow. 

A huge benefit to using this module was that all of the photos are hosted on Flickr, and not on the server of the site itself. This was a big help to us in this campaign since we expected a lot of traffic. With the photos coming off of Flickr.com itself this meant less load on the website server. This, along with Drupal’s scalability (like caching and CSS file aggregation), made it easy for us to keep the website running smoothly when it was attracting a ton of visitors.

Again, congratulations on such a successful campaign! It’s really amazing to see so many people taking action to show their support of ending poverty.

Speaking Up to End Poverty Using a Drupal Website

Today is your day to speak up and do something to help end poverty. The United Nations Millennium Campaign is gathering people around the world today to stand up against poverty and in support of the UN’s Millennium Development Goals. The campaign – called Stand up Speak Out – takes place over just 24 hours, and last year 23 million people stood up against poverty, setting the world record for the most people standing up for a cause. The event is more than halfway over now and looks like it is well on its way to beating its own record.

For the last two months we’ve been working with Jason Wojciechowski and his team at the UN Millennium Campaign on the Stand Up Speak Out website. StandAgainstPoverty.org is a Drupal site that Jason built last year on 4.7 and that we helped him redesign and improve for this year's event (it now runs 5.2). We had a blast coming up with ways to make it easier for people to participate in the campaign online and for the UN Millennium Campaign to really show off the huge numbers of people that are standing up against poverty.

For months now organizers around the world have been mobilizing to set up events where people could join together in person to stand up, and for the past month they’ve been registering these events at StandAgainstPoverty.org. Organizers are now returning to the site to log the number of people that participated in local events and upload their photos. So far 2,018 photos have been uploaded to Flickr showing people from around the world – from school children in India to office workers in Portland – standing up against poverty. We had a lot of fun working on the site’s Flickr implementation – users submit the photos on their event page on the Drupal site, and then the images are tagged with the event title and uploaded into the campaign's Flickr account. It makes for a great Flickr feed and should save the UN Millennium Campaign a ton of time.

For the first time this year users who can't attend a physical event can “stand up” online and join in the attempt to break the world record.  This is a great option to offer users, especially considering the increasing number of people the UN Millennium Campaign has been able to engage online in recent months. They're working with Change.org to facilitate online actions for English-speaking users.  They also built a Facebook app. 

Since Change.org doesn't yet have multilingual support and Stand Up Speak Out is collecting information in five languages, they chose to collect information for other languages by using the combined toolsets of Drupal and Democracy in Action, a powerful CRM tool for non-profits. Drupal's robust internationalization support and ease of use for translators (the Stand Up Speak Out campaign helped fund recent UI work on the l10n_client module) made it simple for users to stand up in any language, and Democracy in Action's great API allowed us to pass all the information into that system for easy reporting later on.

With less than 4 hours remaining in the campaign, everything seems to be running very smoothly. We're excited to see what happens with it! A big congrats to Jason and everyone else involved in organizing this for a successful event and a great Drupal site.

If you haven't yet, join in the activity and be part of a world record! Stand up online against poverty now at http://www.standagainstpoverty.org. You can only participate until 5 pm EDT, so please take action soon. We did this morning : )

Flickr's greets its global audience with censorship

This week Flickr greeted its new international audience with a surprise: radical censorship. Originally I planned to write about how wonderful it was that Flickr added multilingual support for seven more languages. I was going to predict that its number of users and photos would quickly explode. That was before Alex clued me into the buzz from the German Flickr community, people who have been blocked from accessing a good chunk of Flickr’s content.

To access all content on Flickr you need to sign in with a Yahoo! ID. And now if you’re Yahoo! ID says you’re from Germany – or Singapore or Hong Kong or Korea – you’re blocked from accessing “moderate” and “restricted” photos. Because of the country you live in.