Here is something that REALLY would make my day a lot easier, and I think very many article writers would be happier!

The tab for adding a picture to an item in K2 has a lot of empty space... Why not fill it with something that would almost be reason enough to choose K2, all by it's own?

Everyone writing articles are looking for good illustrations. And there are several places where you can find good stuff. One place is Flickr.

A lot of the pictures and illustrations there are copyrighted. But there is also a lot of stuff that is released under a Creative Commons license, and it would be wonderful to have a way to make it easier to use this goldmine! Here is my suggestion:

Make a plugin for Joomla that creates a button in the editor. When you click this button, you get a new window (lightbox version would be cool) where you can search the pictures on Flickr. It should have pretty much the same features as the advanced search in Flickr with some additions. In the settings for the plugin, you should be able to set a username that will be the default as this will give you quick access to your own pictures on Flickr (it is not a bad thing to host your pictures on Flickr and use them on all the websites you have). Then in the pop-up window, you have a radiobutton choice to search only your own pictures of all of Flickr.

All hits are displayed inside the pop-up window and you can then choose one of the pictures that you want to use. You have to be able to set the size and placement as usual, and the distance to the surrounding text/elements.

The most important feature is to be able to limit the search to only CC licensed pictures. And here comes something that will really help a lot in the use of the pictures.

The plugin should make use of all the metadata and information that is available in Flickr. When you insert the picture, it should add two lines under the picture, one with the name of the photographer and the license, the other with a caption. The title of the picture should already be filled in from the title used in Flickr, as well as the keywords and description (as metadata for the picture).

Regarding the display of the license of the picture: Most of the times you need to link to the photographer. You should also have a link to the license page at the CC website. So the credit could be done this way (automatically - if not, via a drop down in the insert window):

Photographer: Svein Wisnaes, 2009, (BY:) Some rights reserved

The name of the photographer links to his homepage on Flickr as default (but should be possible to change if necessary), the (BY:) sign uses the official icons from the CC website and the "Some rights reserved" words links to the correct page on the CC website. This will take care of all the legal stuff without any extra work from the article publisher.

I have been looking for something like this for a long time as it would make any kind of blogging/article writing so much easier.

Today, I found a WordPress plugin that does exactly that. Nice, now that I am moving the biggest site away from WordPres... :-) www.photodropper.com/add-photos-blog/

If you are a programmer, get in touch and we can chat a bit more about how this should look and work. I can assure you - this will really drive traffic to your site. I think it should be in both K2 and Joomla core.

The next step would be to add other similar sources for illustrations.

I would really like to have this feature added. It would be extremely useful

I think most people would love this feature, and would actually use it too. It would also encourage photographers to use Creative Commons on more of their pictures. But most important - it would increase the quality of illustrations in articles as the choice explodes with the easy addition of pictures in Flickr and other similar sites.

I agree. I came to Joomla/K2 from the Wordpress world. A common blogging style is to use 10-15 images for your post. It's just not feasible to upload that many images everyday to your host, on top of all the images you have to store to support themes, etc.

I used a plug-in on WP that allowed me to imbed pictures from my Flickr site very easily. A typical workflow would go like this:
Open up new post(Item in K2), Title, then pull up plugin for Flickr. I made a "set" on Flickr for every blog post. So I'd filter on that set, select the lead image. Write a catchy intro, drop a "read more", then move into meat of article. Write a few sentences, insert photo, a few sentences, photo, until article concludes.

This is a very common style for many bloggers. And it takes advantage of Flickr for storage, as images are only called as page is called up.

The ability to store images offsite, but quickly browse and insert would make K2 even more awesome. Thanks for a great product!