A new Creative Commons search for botany photos on Flickr

We changed the template we use for AoB Blog to HTML5 last week. We’re still using similar CSS, so there’s not a huge change in how the site looks, but there is a big change in how it is put together. It makes adding some features a lot easier and the first is a new Creative Commons photo search that uses the Flickr API. If that’s just a series of letters to you, the result could still be interesting.

Searching for Creative Commons licenced photos on Flickr is easy with an advanced search, but not always useful. A search for ‘tree’ will find lots of results, but not all of them will be a photo of a tree. They’re just as likely to be someone smiling in front of a tree. You can solve this problem by searching photo pools, like Your Kew. The problem here is that not all photos in these pools will be Creative Commons licenced. What would be helpful would be able to search a pool like Encyclopaedia of Life and specify what rights you’d like with the photo.

This is what our new Photo search does. You can search all of Flickr if you like, but you can also search photo pools for specifically licenced photos. At the moment the pools you can search are, The Encyclopaedia of Life, Identified Plants, The Secret Life of Plants, Systematic Botany, Tropical and Exotic Flora, UBCBG Botany Photo of the Day and Your Kew. If you can suggest any others that you’d find useful, I can add them.

Bug-spotting is also helpful. I found a new one while writing this post, so there may be others.

Photo: Bryant Park in winter, Jan 2009 – 01 by Ed Yourdon. Licenced under a CC BY-SA licence.