Treasure Tables is on hiatus as of December 13th, 2007 -- after two years of daily posts, I needed a break. If you're looking for GMing material, I have two recommendations: the hundreds of posts in TT's archives, and my new project, the multi-author GMing blog Gnome Stew. Happy GMing! -- Martin

Using Flickr to Find RPG Images

Mon. February 13, 2006 

Photos can be a great resource for your game, both directly — to show the players what their characters see — and indirectly, as inspiration for the scenarios that you write.

Flickr, a free photo site that supports social tagging, is a neat place to find photos to use in your games.

This topic has come up on TT before: I’ve discussed some ways to use digital photos in your game, recommended taking photos during your sessions and pointed to some excellent photo resources (Silent Ladies and Gents, Opacity’s abandoned urban sites and Space.com’s gallery of sci-fi images). There are a couple of things that set Flickr apart, though, and make it worth discussing on its own.

The first is that you can upload your own photos for free. If you don’t want to maintain your own website, this can be a handy option to have.

The second is that everyone who uploads photos tags them according to their subject matter. This social tagging lets you search by subject and find photos of what you need, taken by people all over the world — it’s pretty neat.

To give you an idea of what you can find on Flickr, here are 5 RPG-related tag searches (off the top of my head):

Update:: …and several reader-recommended tags:

TT reader xcorvis also recommended using Flickr’s tag cluster feature, which is a good suggestion. Here’s the tag cluster for “ruin” to get you started.

There’s an organic quality to using Flickr that makes it different than, say, hitting up Google Image Search — Google is very useful too, but in a different way.

If you haven’t already checked out Flickr as a GMing aid, I recommend doing so — and I hope you enjoy it. I’d also love to hear where you go to find photos for your game — and if you’ve got favorite RPG-related Flickr searches, please share those as well!

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Comments

7 Responses to “Using Flickr to Find RPG Images”

  1. Joel M. on February 13th, 2006 10:30 am

    Another good one along the same lines as ‘cemetary’ is ‘mausoleum’. Some very good stuff in there. ‘Jungle’ and ‘Ancient’ also seem to be interesting.
    Cheers.

  2. xcorvis on February 13th, 2006 2:14 pm

    National Geographic Photo of the Day:
    http://lava.nationalgeographic.com/pod/
    (available as an RSS feed too)

    You can also search their photo archive
    http://lava.nationalgeographic.com/cgi-bin/pod/archive.cgi
    (That’s the PoD archive, not the complete NG archive.)

    On Flickr, try “ruin” or “map”. Don’t forget about clustering - that can lead you to all kinds of interesting stuff.

  3. Martin on February 13th, 2006 3:32 pm

    Thanks! I’ve updated the post to include your Flickr tag suggestions, and xcorvis’s cluster recommendation.

  4. Dave on February 15th, 2006 4:48 pm

    Flickr is also a great resource for geographic photos (as the jungle tag indicates). I try to use photographs to convey the feel of a region or setting, and so have been searching for things from “sheep” (for a culture that does a lot of sheep rearing) to “sahara” to find something that communicates the trackless desert in another part of the world. Keep a thesaurus handy, too, and run quick searches for synonyms for things like swamp, jungle, plains, and so on.

  5. Martin on February 15th, 2006 9:46 pm

    Dave: From my little bit of playing around with them, it looks like the cluster feature is intended to be thesaurus-like — it suggests like phrases, which seems handy.

  6. Joel M. on March 21st, 2006 9:15 am

    This is a fairly old post, but I ran across something nice for landscapes (and modern campaigns) earlier. Wunderground, better known for their weather services, also has a user gallery full of neat pictures. http://www.wunderground.com/wximage/viewimages.html

  7. Martin on March 21st, 2006 10:15 am

    Sweet! This is one of the main reasons that I leave comments open for at least 30 days — thanks for the link, Joel. :)