Thing #6: More Flickr Fun!

I've been having way too much fun with Flickr. (Why yes, I am doing the Things out of order. It's best you don't ask.) The above was done with Spell With Flickr. As was the text at the bottom of my blog. (They need a little work--I'm having trouble with sizing & spacing. Once I perfect the image capture, I'd love to use "Got Comics?" as a header/footer/logo for this blog.)

My favorite Flickr service thus far has GOT to be fd's Flickr toys. There're some absolutely amazing things you can do with your photos here. For example, let's take a look at what I've done to Tania's cat, Skulker!

Here he is in full on lolcat glory:

Getting the Andy Warhol treatment...
(You know, if there'd been an actual soup can in the vicinity of the photo, he would've knocked it over...)












Getting the David Hockney treatment, 'cause no one polaroid is sufficient to capture the glory majesty that is cat:

Demonstrating that yes, cats are truly a puzzle, a veritable riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma:

Playing with paint with the great masters through use of the FX! generator:

And finally, motivating cat owners everywhere:

There were a number of other appliations here that really appealed to me as well, especially the calendar creator and CD cover generator (I love to make the mixes, yes indeed I do.) Unfortunately, lacking a digital camera, I didn't have sufficient images to do them justice.

Which brings me to a nifty api Wilma pointed out--AndreaMosaic. I love picture mosaics. (I especially love jigsaw puzzles made out of picture mosaics--they're truly evil.) I'd tried Mosaic Maker over at fd's Flickr toys but was underwhelmed by the results--I just didn't have enough images available to do anything spiffy with it. I had big gaping holes in my mosaic. (And no, it will never grace this blog, not even as an object lesson of what not to do.) Which is where AndreaMosaic comes in--not only does it provide you with the tool to generate your mosaic, it also gives you a sample set of free images to download so that you can create your mosaic! Here's the result:Thus ends the "Seven Ways of Looking at Skulker" ala Stevens portion of this post.

Over at fd's Flickr Toys I also made a few Librarian Trading Cards. Lacking pictures of myself, I used avatars I'd generated at various sites 'round the web. (Stay tuned for more info about avatars in my Thing#7 post...)

I am a little alarmed by how much time I've spent playing with all this--I can't imagine how much I'd be wasting, er, playing, if I actually had many images to play with. "Play" being the key word here--for the most part, these tools are lots of fun, but I'm not seeing too much in the way of practical work applications. Not unless we relax our signage/graphics rules, anway... If you like making photo albums or scrapbooks for people, these are amazing, and I could see myself making calendars and CD covers, but for the most part these are just for fun.

Or maybe I just haven't spent enough time playing with them to find the practical in them...