It’s amazing what you can get if you show a bit of interest. Simon Harriyott had spoken with the guys at Flickr about their brilliant ‘machinetags’ service in connection with our http://openplaques.org/ project and now we have an official Flickr machinetag. Read about it on the Flickr Dev blog.
What this means is that if any photos of plaques are given a Creative Commons license and tagged with an openplaques id in the format “openplaques:id=<id>” then a link to the openplaques.org record will appear on the Flickr site itself with the wording from the inscription.
In turn, the tagged photo on Flickr will then be displayed on the corresponding plaque page on our website! It can take up to 24 hours before the image appears on our site, so don’t panic if you don’t see it instantly.
The image below is an example of a photo on Flickr.
The image below is of the Tags section for that photo on Flickr. It shows the machinetag “openplaques:id=975″ and a link that gets generated on the Flickr site “This is an Open Plaques site: Immediately to the south of this building….”
The machinetag enables our openplaques server to directly identify photographed plaques and pull in any metadata such as the geographical position (if it’s been placed on a Flickr map).
We are of course immensely proud to be one of only half a dozen sites to have an official Flickr machinetag. As Simon said when I blogged about this on my own blog, “If you don’t ask, you don’t get!”.
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In fact it works better than your link going the other way
my picture at http://www.flickr.com/photos/tim_ellis/1351044509/ has had the openplaques:id=1374 tag for months (possibly more than a year) – while Flickr has spotted it and provided the text from the openplaques site, the openplaques site still says there is no photo…
It’s strange, the openplaques Flickr processor has picked up 23 of your images http://www.openplaques.org/photographers/tim%20ellis but not that one. There must be a subtle error in there somewhere, we will continue to investigate.
It’s interesting if you follow the photographers link you give that some of the photos are listed by plaque no, and some by name of the person – which I guess must be something to do with how they are held in your database…
Yes, the links depend on whether we have managed to parse the plaque inscription yet and link it to a ‘person’ record. If we can’t do this automatically it needs a little bit of curating to get it correct. Over time we are building up a cross-referenced db of people, roles, dates and places.
For historical markers and things other than blue plaques, is there a specific tag you would like us to use for the machine tag to be applied? Or should we use “blue plaque”?
Hi Liza,
Thanks for the comment. You don’t need to add any further specific tags to each Flickr photo other than the one that corresponds to the plaque / historical marker listing on the Open Plaques website, no matter what colour the plaque / marker is.
For example, the machinetag added to the Flickr tags for this Andy Warhol red plaque in NYC was openplaques:id=4524
http://www.flickr.com/photos/70323761@N00/526156186/
http://openplaques.org/plaques/4524
Once you’ve added the correct machinetag to your Flickr photo for that plaque, given the photo a Creative Commons license (and made sure your photo isn’t ‘hidden from search’ in your Flickr settings), it should appear on the Open Plaques website within 24 hours.
Do let us know if you have any other questions. Look forward to seeing what photos and plaques you contribute!
Thanks for the reply! I am sure I am making this more difficult that it need be. But, what happens to markers not on your website? For example, you only have one plaque for Michigan, from Grand Rapids. How does a marker get on your list for the machine tag to be assigned to it? For the example you gave, the word “plaque” is in the title of the Creative Commons picture. If I title something “historical marker” and it’s not on your list, then it shouldn’t be picked up by the machine tag.
Sorry if I’m over thinking this, I would just hate to be on the constant lookout to find I’m not looking out for what you’re looking for!
Hi Liza,
Anyone can add new listings to the website. If you look at the Open Plaques site, you’ll notice a link to Contribute at the top of every page.
On that page, a link in the second paragraph says ‘add it’. People are then asked to do a quich search of the site (eg. the name of the person or event the plaque is about). This is to minimise duplicates.
If the plaque is not listed, you then go to a simple web form and fill in the inscription, address, colour, etc. Then you simply submit it and the new listing is published – and the relevant tag for Flickr will be displayed on the newly created page.
Don’t worry if you don’t have all the information (eg. name of organisation who put up the plaque) as it can be updated afterwards by us. Inscription and address is a good enough starting point.