Flickr Archive: Search issues

Users of our archive hosted on Flickr may have noticed that the interface has gone through some changes recently. Unfortunately this has included what seems a serious glitch in the search tool- basically that you may not get any results at all even if a photograph is named exactly with what you search for (such as 'Umm es-Surab' as I recently found).

My basic experimentation with the problem indicates that a search will find items 'tagged' with the search terms, but not if they are named with that term. If you are having trouble finding a site as a temporary solution I advise that people search for photographs of their site using the georeferenced search tool at www.flickr.com/apaame/map
You can find instructions on how to do this on our YouTube channel: http://youtu.be/rFEF4Vjdo00
If you still have difficulty finding your site, please contact us directly.

Thank you for your patience as we adjust the archive to the changes occurring on the Flickr interface.

Searching APAAME Flickr by location

Perhaps one of the easiest way to search for images of a place is to search by its location. You will now be able to search using this method on our Flickr archive because we are currently uploading our geo-referencing metadata with our images. We'll let you know when it is all uploaded - check our Twitter @APAAME.

We geo-tag our images in one of two ways:

1. a digitised image from the collection is georeferenced based on the site it represents
2. a digital photograph is georeferenced based on the GPS of the flight path or camera when the photo was taken in real time.

The resulting scatter of location 'dots' will reflect these two methods of geotagging:

• many photographs may be represented by one 'dot' where they have been georeferenced based on the location of the site
• sequences of dots may indicate the path taken on a particular flight

To help you search our Flickr archive by location, we have composed this short tutorial.

How to search for a location in Flickr: (to expand images simply click on them)
1. Go to http://www.flickr.com/apaame/map

What www.flickr.com/apaame/map looks like when you first get there.

2. Zoom to the area you are interested in finding photographs for

Here I have zoomed in onto the ancient and modern town of Umm el-Jimal.

3. 'Refresh' the image list (pink dots will populate the map area if there are images for it)

This is where you find the refresh button when you have chosen the area you are interested in.

Notice the cluster of pink dots in the centre of Umm el-Jimal and that the list of photographs has gone down from around 60,000 to 200 or so in this instance.

4. If there are more images listed than what shows on the thread, click on the arrow to the right to scroll through them.

Click on the arrow to the right of the thread to scroll through available images for this area. Notice the distribution of pink dots has changed to suit those images now showing in the thread.

5. If you click on the pink dot that represents photograph/s georeferenced to that point - the thread of images will highlight those images that correspond to that geographic location. Click on an image thumbnail to view a larger thumbnail, and click on the larger thumbnail to open the image in a new window.

Notice the 'dot' clicked on has a white selection cloud around it and the two images for that location are indicated to the left of the thread - one of which has an expanded thumbnail to allow you a better look.

Note: the map will only show the locations of those images that are visible in the thread, not all the images in the archive. To access all of the images for the viewable area you must scroll through the thread.

We hope this quick tutorial has been helpful. If you would like some clarification, or think we should include something else, please let us know. Likewise, if you have any pointers for us.

More tutorials about how to use our archive are available on our YouTube feed: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLhsAYi0XrGzZg75WIYZEEWqdJ0h1kxQpx