Flickr

"Digital cameras have changed how we take and store our photos."

Truer words were never spoken. Up until my oldest daughter turned 3 or so we shot through rolls and rolls of film. For a while I think that we kept Fuji and Ilford in business. Of course as a first time parent of the cutest child ever born we felt the overwhelming need to document every single move she made. Hell, we probably have a pic of her first dookie somewhere.

Then came digital, more importantly, high quality digital. The pictures are easier to shoot, do not need to be developed and can be stored on your computer. They can be altered with software. More importantly they could be organized and easily retrieved. They can be copied and emailed. Now here we have Flickr and other sites like it. We can now easily share every photo we take, with the world if we want (provided that they want to see it).

Okay, wait; we are supposed to be talking about libraries here I think. So what can Flickr and the like to for us in the library? Well, the easy answer is that they can host our pictures. The fact is that photos take space on our servers and use up bandwidth as they are transferred to the viewers computers. So why not allow someone else to share the burden.

More important than taking away from the hosting load I think that the ease of use on these sites allows novice users to do what it would have taken someone experienced in web design hours to do. This allows you to save that expertise for more important projects yet always you to develop that all important bound with your patrons and the community.

So to spin it back to my kids I have thrown up some pics for all of you to view and adore. You will notice I do not appear in any of the pictures (this way you can all keep your appetites). My wife does not appear in any of the pictures because she is usually taking them. So above is one to start things off and the link to the rest. Click here to see all the pics.