Flikr Assignment #6

My husband’s consideration of a job in Tampa, Florida has led me to want to know more about the area. By searching and saving photos in Flikr, I am hoping to learn more about what I might see if we were to move there. Some things I would really be interested in seeing would include but not be limited to photos of the city, surrounding neighborhoods, local activities, schools, libraries, beaches and entertainment. Below is an account of my search through Flikr...

I knew when I began my search that were my husband to decide to take this job, we would be looking for living arrangements near MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida. This information combined with my interest to see the items previously mentioned led me to search the following terms:

Tampa
Tampa neighborhood
Tampa school
MacDill
MacDill home
MacDill house
MacDill housing
St. Petersburg
St. Petersburg, Florida
Aerial Tampa
Tampa neighborhood street

The photos I gathered for this assignment can be viewed here in my Tampa Area and Neighborhoods galleries.

Search Experience:
As I searched using the term Tampa, I found a wide variety of photos related to the Tampa area. This was a fairly broad term and I was hoping to narrow it down, so I tried searching ‘Tampa neighborhood’ within the tag of ‘Tampa Bay’ and got better results. Any searches involving ‘MacDill,’ retrieved mass amounts of photos of jets and planes, mostly flying in airshows at the base. Maybe people just don’t tag their home/neighborhood photos with ‘MacDill,’ or maybe there are just so many other photos of jets and air force operations that they block out the types of photos I was looking for. I tried looking up a few of the areas that I knew were near Tampa, including Pinellas Park and St. Petersburg. I had to chuckle to myself when I put in ‘St. Petersburg’ and was immediately confronted with photos of St. Petersburg, Russia. After adding Florida to the end, the results were MUCH more relevant.

Satisfaction of Search Results:
Overall, I think my search went ok. I think I could do better if I spent some more time on Flikr getting to know the different user groups and maybe finding some that are more specific to my interests. I went into this assignment with a pretty general quest and I think my results reflected that. Learning more about Tampa before looking for photos again might help me to develop better search terms and enable me to find what I’m really looking for. I get the feeling that what I want is out there, but I just don’t know the best way to access it. As I said, more time with Flikr and a more specific search goal would help in the future.

Evaluation of Flikr
Overall I thought Flikr was very user-friendly and I didn’t have any trouble maneuvering around the site. I was impressed with the amount of high quality photos available for viewing and was surprised to see many groups that were devoted to perusing Flikr and rating photos within different photo communities. Before this assignment, I didn’t know you could group the photos of others on your own personal account as I did into my Tampa Area gallery. I thought that it was just a site to post and tag your own personal photos to share with others. I wondered as I looked at the photos how many people don’t even use the tagging feature. I posted photos of my students doing a project to share with their parents on another Flikr account a couple of years ago, but I never tagged any of them. I’m surprised that Flikr hasn’t gone the way of Facebook in trying to force people to share more information. Requiring people to tag their photos would definitely increase transparency and sharing ability.