You Oughta Be In Pictures #90 Sharing Photos

Used to be, if you wanted to share a classic photo, like the one left, you'd have to hurry to finish your film roll, rush it to the drugstore and then wait for a phone call to go pick up your prints on photo paper. Then you'd have to mail it to someone via good ol' U.S. Mail and hope they received it in good condition. With the advent of digital technology, you could save it on a floppy diskette, e-mail it and wait for your recipient to respond. Now, thanks to sites like Flickr, Photobucket, and other digital album storage sites, your friends and family can readily access the images at their own convenience immediately and you don't have to pay for processing. Who wants to wait for a picture like this one? I've had a Flickr account for awhile and use it mostly to store photos I've taken from my digital camera but also favorite photos I've scanned from old family albums. Not only is it easier to access an on-line album, but it's a way to preserve and archive the old paper images that have become family heirlooms. There are also editing capabilities to crop or rotate your image. For beyond basic editing, you can always use a free site like Picnik to get out red-eye or adjust color saturation. I watched the video introducing all the different photo sharing websites but I've already explored the ones listed. One is really just as good as the next one but I suppose I prefer Flickr. Protecting the privacy of my images is important to me but I'm not naive enough to think that once that picture is out there, whether on a blog like this one or on Facebook, the chances of it showing up elsewhere is pretty good. Fortunately, there are billions of photos out there to steal so why choose mine? Still, it should always be in the back of your mind that anything published is now public. And really, now that you've seen this image, it's gonna be hard to get it out of your mind anyway. Yikes.