Where are the pictures?

After many years of dedication, Darel Heitkamp has decided that maintaining all of the photographs was a job he couldn't sustain along with family and professional responsibilities. However, all is not lost. The popular "Recent Photos" and "Photo Archive" features of the Online Birding Guide are both being moved to an online photo archiving service called flickr.

The main advantages of the flickr site are

1. our large photo database of Indiana birds will now be searchable by key words (called tags) such as bird species, bird families, counties, location (e.g. state parks), specific photographers, and by other interesting features, such as birds on a nest, juvenile birds, birds in flight, birds at feeder, birds with a fish and so on;
2. photographers can upload their photos to the site themselves instead of relying on Darel;
3. flickr automatically displays the specific camera model used and all the camera settings (EXIF information) for each photo without the photographer having to do anything;
4. there are lots of other interesting bird photo groups on flickr that you can join and even post photos to, such as Digiscoping Forum, Birds on a Wire, Birds on Signs, Water Birds, Only Ospreys, Bird Nests, Bird Silhouettes, Birds of Prey, Sun-kissed Birds, Backyard Birds, and many more.

How will this will be different for you? Flickr is NOT run by the Indiana Audubon Society. You need to go to http://www.flickr.com and SIGN UP for a FREE membership. This free membership allows you to enjoy the gallery of photos, gives you 20MB a month of uploading "bandwidth", and gives you a total of 200 photos to upload on flickr, which for most people will last a long time. If you like flickr, the purchase of a "pro" account will give you an unlimited number of photos to upload (beyond the 200 limit of the free membership) and a 2GB a month "bandwidth".

You will need to choose a screen name. Then you can join our group, Indiana Audubon Society's Gallery and Photo Archive at http://flickr.com/groups/iasphotos, from which you can also connect to any of the other groups mentioned above. Once you get to the IAS page, you can look at the most recently posted photos, page through all the photos, and read the discussion forum under the word "Discuss". In the discussion forum Darel has posted instructions on how to upload photos and how to search the database using keywords (tags).

We encourage everyone to join--it's free, and it's truly the future for photo archiving. It won't take long for you to see the power of flickr. If you already have a Yahoo acount, you can use your Yahoo username and password to log in because Flickr is in partnership with Yahoo--you'll see where on the main sign-in page.

Thanks to Darel for all of his work, and thanks to you for supporting the Online Birding Guide over the years and making the photo gallery so popular.

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