Using Flickr Photos inside SL

I've been playing around with importing photos into SL, and making things from them. Examples would posters, pics that are framed and such. I read this morning about how Flickr has certain kinds of photos that are free. By free I mean they can be used commercially because of the license they are covered by. So, I have a couple of questions... one, any suggestions on how to handle photos in SL, like should I "cut them up" to help load times, and what is the biggest image size allowed in SL? Also, are there groups in SL already doing this sort of thing?

Here is the link that got me interested in using Flickr: http://featherston.blogspot.com/2006/10/flickr-creativity-machine.html

That's pretty cool, Mary. While as a texture artist trying to make a living, I can't say I welcome all that free competition, I do think it's a step in the right direction for such a widely free license to exist. Someone had to be the first to do it, so kudos to Flickr.

I'm always in favor of anything that helps bring 3D (and 2D) to the masses.


If by "cut them up" you mean slicing a large image into several smaller ones, that's not really a good idea. That will only serve to increase network traffic, as there will be multiple calls to the asset server to deliver all those individual textures instead of just one.

Also, it would make the load time of the image as a whole much less predictable. With one texture, no matter how big or how long it takes, at least the whole thing will appear at once. With multiple slices, they'll all appear at different times. There's nothing worse than seeing 3/4 of an image, and then having to wait and wait for that last stubborn quarter to show up.



The largest texture size SL will accept is 1024x1024.

Don't go that big though. The larger your texture, the more it will slow down client performance. The biggest reason SL is so slow is because of texture size mismanagement. People do thoughtless things like put a 1024x1024 on a 2-foot sign that's never gonna take up more than a couple hundred pixels on anyone's screen. The end result is the average scene in SL has gigabytes worth of texture data in view, while the average video card can only process a few hundred megabytes at most, so of course SL runs at snail speed.

Always go as small as you possibly can with textures. I usually suggest as a rule of thumb that about 80% of your textures should be 256x256 or smaller, about 15% should be 512x512, and only about 5% or so should be 1024x1024. (Texture sizes are always measured in powers of two, in case you didn't know.)


I'm not sure how you're defining "groups" in this context, but people are always looking for free texture sources. So, if no one's stumbled onto the Flickr stuff yet, you can bet that they will now that you've pointed it out.

Thanks for the info!!!!!