Flickr Forum Posts Roundup

I've been posting my ideas for more and better metadata over in FlickrIdeas Forum. Flickr is so ripe with metadata, I'm getting really excited about the possibilities we could do with it. I'm sure that by exposing the metadata as RDF (and formatted such that smushing is straightforward), the power of Flickr increases tremendously. At the very least, as new applications are built to take advantage of the new metadata (Show me all blog comments made in the blogosphere by authors who shoot on Nikon D70 and that have images on Flickr rated greater than a 3 out of 5 and tagged as 'dog'.) more people will see the power of metadata and tags, and add more and more tags.

Anyway, stepping down from that soapbox, here's the current roundup. Please post your ideas and followups!


  • Explicit Link to Photo in Feed Entry - Provide an explicit link to the image itself, not the page about the image.

  • FOAF, Please - Use FOAF, among other things, as the metadata for the author of forum posts, images, and image comments. Use foaf:mbox_sha1sum for easy identification.

  • Nested Albums - I propose adding more meaning to tags, such as subtypes.

  • Metadata for the Image Itself - Adding a <link> pointing towards RDF describing the image itself, especially its tags.

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