More on Remote Images from Flickr
The problems in Firefox with bringing in remote images got us investigating. We haven’t been able to replicate the problem but have a few additional suggestions that might help.
When you get the results of an advanced search for Creative Commons images in Flickr, you’re shown a page (or pages) with large thumbnails of pictures on the left. If you right-click over one of the thumbnails and go to “properties,” there are two web addresses given, one for the link that the picture contains and one for the image itself, and it is easy to mix them up. Best to follow Candace’s direction. Click on the thumbnail, and it will take you to a larger version of the picture on a new page. It’s really valuable to get the bigger picture with its higher quality rather than the largish thumbnail anyway, so go for big! Be sure to copy the entire address. You may have to make the “Properties” box a little bigger to easily copy it all.
When you click on “Properties” for the large version of the picture, only one web address is given, and that’s named “Location.” That’s what you want to copy and paste.
If you are moving through this whole process in Safari on a Mac, right-clicking (control-clicking) over a picture brings up a menu that doesn’t contain “Properties.” Click on “Open image in new window.” If you isolate the picture so that it is the only thing in the window, the web address you need to copy is in the address bar for that window. Copy and paste that, and the image will open remotely in the workBench screen.
An important additional note, if you are as much of a fan of the Eyedropper in the Color Chooser as I am. After you bring a remote image into a project, you can’t use the Eyedropper again in that project. It’s not a bug. Flash has built-in, complicated security features that are triggered in the presence of remotely loaded content. Those features block the Eyedropper code. We haven’t found a way to work around that security block, so that the Eyedropper can continue to function with remote images.
However, there is a good alternative to the Eyedropper in these cases. We just revised the Color Chooser palettes, which are collections of five colors that are fed into the Color Chooser from the colourlovers.com website. You can now even pick a color that you like and find matching pallets that artists and graphic designers have created. We have a new post up about the palettes, where you can experiment with these new features:
http://blog.trintuition.com/?p=146
Of course you can experiment as well with the Color Chooser when you open your own workBench.
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My favorite color tool is the button to save the color (can’t remember what it is called). As I start every project, I make sure to keep every important color there so I can find them fast for other screens. Otherwise I end up going back and forth to screens just to “pick up” the color I had been using. It also keeps you from going too crazy with colors changing all the time— a common and visually disruptive thing that kids often do.
A study on perception showed that the human brain processes and “connects” things in this order:
1. color
2. shape
3. words
It makes sense, since that is the order in which babies learn to process, too. So use color to show relationship and UNITY, even before shape. And remember that people get around to the words LAST so keep them succinct (oops–I wrote too much already!)
It’s really interesting that the brain processes and connects color first. That suggests the need to use colors in consistent ways to make a project hold together and seem unified. Thanks, Candace! Interesting.