Flickr Galleries: Fun with Flickr Commons

Over the past month I have been playing with Flickr’s new Galleries ^[1]. Each gallery is limited to 18 images from anywhere in Flickr (provided that the image owner has made their image available for inclusion in galleries). I thought it might be fun to try my hand at picking the best of the new images added to the Flickr Commons each week.

Each Thursday over the past month I have created a Commons Picks of the Week gallery from the all the images added to the Commons in the prior 7 days.

Here are the galleries from the first month of my experiment. Let me know what you think.

• September 17, 2009 Commons Picks of the Week ^[2]
• September 24, 2009 Commons Picks of the Week ^[3]
• October 1, 2009 Commons Picks of the Week ^[4]
• October 8, 2009 Commons Picks of the Week ^[5]

Each week I had about 150 new images from which to select my 18 favorites. Since many institutions seem to load their images each week along some thematic lines, sometimes I felt like I had too many of one kind of image. Moving forward I may switch to bi-weekly or monthly to get a larger pool of images from which to pick.

I think there is a lot of room for making fun thematic galleries from images in the Commons. I tried my hand at this too and came up with Bathing Beauties of the Commons ^[6].  Of course the fact that all images across Flickr can co-exist in these galleries means that Commons images now have another way to be pulled into the public eye next to other ‘regular’ images.

I have a short wish list of enhancements I would love to see:

• slideshow option for display of the gallery within Flickr
• a way to embed a gallery on an external website as a slideshow
• some way to follow the new galleries created by an individual (RSS feed or subscription option)

If you try your hand creating a gallery of Commons images, please post a link as a comment to this post so we can all take a look.