Oregon State Productions Blog

We’ve become avid users of the photo sharing service Flickr here at OSU. We go way beyond merely having an official OSU account on the service.  Key content on our main OSU site and top level pages is integrated with our account.

Press releases (like this one) created by our news office use Flickr images. That way the image from the release becomes a searchable part of our Flickr presence. The multimedia page on our News site features a Flickr search and categories that pull from sets in our account. The pages also randomly pulls preview images from these sets right onto the site.

Our Powered by Orange campaign features a Flickr component, too. The Benny on the Move gallery features photos of people who have taken a cutout of our mascot, Benny the Beaver, and photographed him traveling around the world. This is done by merely uploading the photo to Flickr and tagging it with “bennyonthemove.” Our Summer Session program is also running a “Flat Benny” contest.

We originally started using Flickr for one of our student bloggers who traveled to Antarctica on a research project and chronicled his trip with hundreds of amazing images in Transmissions from the Ice Sheet.

OSU Archives is also a member of the Flickr Commons, joining the Library of Congress and the National Galleries of Scotland as the first university to become part of this group that shares archival photos with the world via Flickr.

We also share photos with Facebook and Ning, as well as via a number of other online services. But on the photo side, nothing is quite as extensive as our integration with Flickr. It folds nicely into our own site, and it also moves a lot of our content to a space where it is exposed to an audience searching for strong images. So far, it’s been an effective way to share our photos.

CATEGORIES: Content Management Social Media