As the fieldwork for Hotties with the CAP103 Northern Haiti project has begun to wind down and the opportunity to upload photos is much better for us, we've had some internal discussions about where to upload photos and how HOT can better store and share images in the future.
Drawing from these conversations, we thought there was a need for a central place to share project photos and browse them in an intuitive fashion. We thought Flickr, who recently increased their free storage to 1 terabyte (!), would be a great solution. They also use open source software quite a bit, OSM in some instances for their maps, and uploading is relatively easy for people of various technical abilities. Here, we could pick out photos for organizational reports, presentations at conferences, hot.openstreetmap.org, etc; People could view So far, there is a HOT flickr user account - http://www.flickr.com/photos/hotosm We've uploaded several photos from the Northern Haiti project and short videos up there. One drawback for this account is that you must have the hotosm gmail password to post into this account, so I also created a flickr group for HOT. This allows anyone (mapping party participants, for example) who has a flickr account to add their photos (already uploaded to their personal flickr account) to the HOT Group. http://www.flickr.com/groups/hotosm The drawback to this is that photos aren't able to be sorted or organized as I understand. The flickr group and user account is not completely organized. Feedback on organizing it (creating sets or collections based on projects ? country ?) (or even using alternative services) are welcome. Also welcome you to share your photos there too ! As we discussed this, a couple other purposes for photos popped into my mind and my thoughts: A] a place that would have long term storage of our photos, for archival's sake. Although were a young organization HOT will be in existence for the indefinite future and each of us won't be around or involved in HOT forever. B] a place those out in the field, often with a slow internet connection and very limited time, could quickly upload and share photos through social media. Scenario A: Down the line in the future, I'm guess likely a web server with some redundant storage as well. Scenario B: This is user preference although HOT already has strong presence on twitter and facebook and can easily reach out to people that way. In my experience, twitter was quite useful, as I could upload a photo directly from the android phone. Others have used facebook and instagram as well. Unfortunately, flickr's mobile application on the android is not very intuitive and isn't as easy as other mentioned options. Regards, Will Skora
_______________________________________________ HOT mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/hot
