Storing Memories via Flickr and a QR Code

Image source: http://mrg.bz/q6hA2t

Think for a second how many photos are actually taken during the course of the school year by your journalism staff.  Our English teacher/yearbook editor, Mr. Vrana said that his students took well over 6,000 photos this year!

Now think of how few photos are actually published in the annual yearbook. Not very many.   All the credit for this idea/blog post goes to Mr. Vrana.  He approached me at the end of the school year about possibly storing all the unpublished photos somewhere digitally, creating a QR Code that links to all of those photos and then placing the QR Code on the cover of the next yearbook.  Inevitably, anyone could access those photos in the future via the QR code as long as we maintain the Flickr account.  What a great way to "store" those photos that never made the cut for final publishing!

So, my adventure to figure out a solution began.  I thought about Dropbox, but realized we wouldn't have enough storage for the number of pictures that we wanted to upload/store.   I played with Google Picassa a bit but didn't find it very user friendly.  I settled on Flickr.  I had seen a tweet about their new update in which each user gets a Terabyte of storage.  Done!  I created a Flickr account and began the task of uploading around 2,500 photos.  Yes, it was time consuming, but next year I plan on having students upload their journalism photos as they take them throughout the year to eliminate a major upload at the end of the year.

Thanks for the great idea, Mr. Vrana and to @wmchamberlain for the encouragement to blog about this idea.  Thanks, William!