For those who are not familiar with it, Flickr is a way for users to share their photos online. Users can make them public or private depending on how they want to share them. The great part about Flickr is that users can tag their photos so they are searchable similar to bookmarks with del.icio.us.

One additional thing is that Flickr supports RSS feeds for these tags. This means that you can do search for a particular tag, then subscribe to the RSS feed for that tag and every time someone uploads a photo and tags it with your search, it will come right to your RSS aggregator.

Here is an example:

Say you want to setup an RSS feed for photos with the tag “Gettysburg” in them

• Got to this url: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/gettysburg/
• Scroll all the way down to the bottom and you will see a link that says “Subscribe to stuff tagged with gettysburg” — Add this link to your RSS Aggregator and that’s it!
• If you want to change the tag, simply replace the word Gettysburg in the above URL with any tag such as Antietam, CivilWar, battlefield, etc.

A few comments on this feature:

• You can get some great photos to show in your classroom.
• There are some incredible shots done by professional photographers
• You can locate some original photos by Civil War era photographers such as O’Sullivan and Brady.
• Some of the photos may even be in the Creative Commons
• Beware! You may also get photos of people vacationing in Gettysburg.

Check it out and let me know what you think.

Until next time…