Since a picture is worth a thousand words, the NRC has long made photos available to the public through the photo gallery on our website. The photos help explain who we are and what we do. But the gallery had a number of significant limitations – including a lack of visibility, difficult uploading process and a search engine that was clumsy at best.
The rise of social networks, however, and the ease and popularity of photo-sharing has given us a ready alternative. Beginning today, the NRC will be using Flickr.com to host our images rather than the NRC website. This change will give us a bigger audience and be easier for us – and you, the public – to access the images.
Among the benefits is the ability to “tag” a photo. Tags are keywords associated with each image that makes searching for and organizing images much easier. Flickr also allows us to organize NRC photos into sets, which can then be viewed as a slideshow. These sets are a group of photos, which are categorized under one heading –such as creating a set for all operating power reactors.
With Flickr, it is extremely easy to create or join an existing community, such as becoming part of the Official US Government Photostreams, a group comprised of official U.S. federal, state and local government image banks on Flickr.
Flickr also has an RSS feed option that can notify you whenever a new photo is uploaded.
Images uploaded on Flickr can be viewed by anyone and found easily on a variety of search engines such as Google, Bing and Dogpile. We hope this will translate into more traffic to our photos and an increased understanding about the NRC mission and activities. All photos on the site continue to be free, and anyone can download them for their use.
Some of the social media functions associated with Flickr will be disabled, and comments instead funneled back here to this post.
So go and check out the new photo gallery NRCgov Photostream on Flickr.
Ivonne Couret Public Affairs Officer
U.S. NRC Blog 