Key functionality

Discovery

Discover the wealth of Flickr Commons content in ways you've never been able to before.

• home page provides a taster of images
• powerful feature-rich search page

Contribution

The main photo page provides easy to use tools for tags, dates and mapping.

• all image information visible alongside image for quick reference
• view highest res image via magnifier
• tags easily added (a common complaint about 'new' Flickr)
• flag existing tags if inappropriate
• make suggestions of date
• use searchable, interactive map to suggest locations

Updating & enhancement

All interaction is captured and easy to use tools are provided to send approved updates directly to Flickr.

• suggestions and flagged content are clearly displayed
• one-click approval by Commons institutes

Current issues and future plans

This has been developed in my spare time and at this stage is very minimally tested - consider it an 'alpha' release. All feedback and bug reports are not just welcome, but actively sought (see contact details below).

Issues

• It is essentially untested for various browser/platform options, code validation and basic accessibility requirements!
• It is running on cheap shared hosting so liable to experience performance issues! (though currently the only problems I have seen have been related to Flickr API performance)
• a few immediate design/functional enhancements needed:
  • some issues around making suggestions on images where users haven't enabled public tagging etc. These should not apply to Commons images though and has been raised with Flickr
  • Permit special characters in text fields (currently things like apostrophes break the tool) - done 18/7/13 but needs testing
  • Improve tagging with multiple tags - clarify if comments are needed etc
  • Display user's tagging count as number of actual tags, not number of suggestions (which can contain any number of individual tags)
  • Enable admin tools - completed on Latest activity page, but needs to be added to individual Photo page
  • Pagination on Suggestions page
  • Tooltips on icons (mainly now done)
  • Report spam comments
  • Enable commenting
  • A user should be able to delete/edit their own suggestions (pre-approval) in the case that they have made a mistake
  • Have adjacent images from owners photostream visible and linked from photo page
  • Change 'nearby' image grid to a map view
  • Enable more elegant error catching - sometimes the Flickr API can be a bit flaky and currently this results in errors being displayed on pages
  • image zoom tool fails on certain images and loads a Flickr error image - I think this is where users have prevented access to original images, which shouldn't be the case with Commons images - please report any instances you see. Equally the zoom is pretty pointless if the original is available but it is not high-res
  • When reporting tags it should give visual confirmation\ which tag is being reported
  • Search page: "Sometimes when I conduct searches, many images do not appear in the search, however, the info for these absent images does appear - unable to replicate but please report if seen frequently"

Some longer term plans and ideas

• Enhanced home page e.g.
  • different galleries - imprecisely geotagged or dated images, images near user's location or in random location, on this day, low tag count ...
  • manually chosen 'daily challenge', featured set etc
• Layout options on search page (e.g. image grid, map view)
• Allow search results view by set (handy if a Commons member wants to crowdsource specific images)
• Display the names and a link to the sets and galleries that an image is in
• display and add notes
• enhanced editing map (e.g. satelite view)
• integration with other data sources/APIs to display related content
• Using 3rd party services like Google image search to identify usage, similar images etc
• Enable social sharing - Twitter, Facebook etc
• Posting comments to the image page after activities are completed e.g. when a geotag is accepted it could note this and credit the user who suggested it