Once again, at this year's Festival, we're asking anyone who would like to contribute to a visual collage of Greenbelt 08 online to post their images & brief videos to the Flickr website.
If you've done this in previous Festivals, you can use the same information to log in to Flickr. If you've not done it before and would like to join in, you'll need to create a Yahoo! account to use Flickr - or you can use any existing Yahoo! account you might have.
Don't forget that if you have a Pro Flickr account you can now upload short videos (of up to 90 seconds' duration) into your photostream - most formats taken by digital cameras are acceptable, and they'll play in a web browser. Find out more in the Video FAQ.
Please 'tag' your photographs & videos with 'greenbelt2008' - if you'd like also to tag them with Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday or Tuesday to indicate which day they were taken on then you are welcome to.
'Tags' are like keywords which allow other people (and you) to easily find photos of a particular subject - have a look at some tags of Greenbelt regulars:
This year we also hope to start producing an interactive map of images across the Festival by geotagging the images.
Geotagging is the process of placing a virtual object at a specific geographical location. This means that it can be displayed in its location through an application such as Google Earth or even a web site like Google Maps. You can 'geotag' your Flickr images from Greenbelt to show where on site they were taken.
The loc.alize.us website is a good place to start - visit the Localize Bookmarklet page to get a free tool which can add geographical information to your Flickr photographs. The page has full instructions on how to use it, and the tool works with the Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari and Opera web browsers.
Once you've added the tool, login to Flickr, visit your photograph you want to geotag and click the tool you've just placed in your Bookmarks or Favorites by following the above instructions. A map will appear in place of the your photo, you can search for 'cheltenham, uk' and then find the racecourse (to the north of the town). Zoom in and you should start to recognise the main buildings - you'll also see the aftermath of the Festival site from two years ago. You can place a pointer on the maps at the appropriate location and then save it - this will 'geotag' your image. Make sure your image is also tagged with 'greenbelt2008' for it to show up in the second link below.
Once you've done this, you can visit the loc.alize.us site and see either:
geotagged Official Greenbelt photographs from the 2008 Festival or
everyone's geotagged pictures from the 2008 Festival
In the meantime you can view the latest official photographs on a map on the loc.alize.us web site. This site works well in Firefox or Safari, but unfortunately doesn't quite work as nicely in Internet Explorer. Alternatively, if you've got Google Earth installed on your computer, download a file which will let you fly over the Festival site through, over and around the photographs.
If you upload any videos to YouTube or Google Video then please also 'tag' them with 'greenbelt2008'.
You could always have a look at previous years' images on Flickr:
