1. People, Places and Events: images of social, political, contemporary and historical events of national significance ( http://www.flickr.com/groups/PictureAustralia_ppe ).
2. Ourtown: local perspectives of Australia’s rural and urban spaces. ( http://www.flickr.com/groups/pa_ourtown ).
3. Re-Picture Australia: mashups of public domain historical images. ( http://www.flickr.com/groups/re-pictureaustralia/ ).

In order to provide the metadata about these images to Picture Australia Flickr users submit their images to one of these groups. We generate a Harvest Control List (eg http://www.pictureaustralia.org/flickr/pa_pool.html ). This list contains links to XML documents generated by the Flickr API which are ingested and mapped to the Picture Australia metadata schema ( http://www.pictureaustralia.org/schemas/pa/picture.xsd ) by our metadata harvester on a weekly basis.

This process works well for us and has added over 55,000 contemporary image records to Picture Australia. There are a few issues though:
- Monitoring: Contributions to the groups need to be monitored and images that are inappropriate or out-of-scope (puppies and kitties) need to be removed from the group. Thankfully such images aren’t added very frequently.
- Metadata quality: Often a title, a description, some subjects and coverage information is useful – particularly if the record in question is to be discovered (!). When such information isn’t provided we try to make contact with the contributor of the image and request that some of this information be added to their record.
- Persistence: Image records removed from Flickr by users disappear from Picture Australia. Will Flickr be around forever or at least as long as most collecting institutions?