reFrame : Yet Another Photo Sharing Idea

Here is an idea I had recently for a new photo sharing application, which would make it easier for anyone to use photographs in their own context. A site is created where users can sign up. They submit the name of their Flickr photostream. The site pulls in any photos from their stream that have rights set to Creative Commons remix license. Any user of the site can select any image pulled from the users Flickr photostreams collectively. There could be a single photostream "lightbox" used to select images from, I'm not going into details here.

The idea is to let any user "reframe" any image contributed to a pool of images by other users. Reframe means to give the image another context. For example, an expert on historic photographic processes might frame an image with a text explaining the history and chemistry of the process that made the photograph and how to identify an example of this type of photographic image. A family historian might frame the same image with the biography and family history of the subjects in the photograph. A single image has a potentially unlimited number of contexts or "frames." The system would allow anyone, in the style of a wiki, to "reframe" any image.

Users of the site would have to agree that others can place their images in any possible context, possibly unintended or unflattering, which is why there is a requirement for the non-commercial remix license. Of course, you can do this already, but I do not think there exists and application that makes this easy and puts it all in one location.

This might be combined with my idea for a photo wiki system that encouraged the "quick-slow" process enabled by the so-called bliki, where the same contextual system could allow a quick caption when the image is posted and later more sophisticated commentary and use of the image would follow by creating "pages" associated with the image.

One might object, saying that anyone is free to combine images and text if there were a word processor style system that allowed images to be freely dropped into text anywhere. But the web has shown that it is better to provide a system that structures content and interaction as it being created (wiki allows this process to be continuous). This is where the quick and easy part comes in...it is not so easy to arrange photos and text with a word processor. You do not see many people using a word processor instead of a blog or photo sharing site, although they could create richer documents and post them to their own website using today's word processing applications.

I wish archives and institutions would catch on to the power of reframing images in their collections using contexts contributed freely by users. The academics, visitors, people on the web, anyone should be able to frame images of artifacts or media artifacts themselves, historic photos, old films, video, etc. to create the richest possible understanding of the holdings. And make both the artifacts and knowledge about them more accessible.

I'm thinking of grabbing phpflickr, Dojo and Codeigniter and putting this together, but with the work on Foody and Folkstreams, I really have limited time. Steal this idea, please.