Thing #4: Flickr

Flickr is pretty cool. I was aware of it -- and had used it to search for images. But, I had never bothered to sign up for an account. Frankly, my pictures aren't really something that I thought would be of use to anyone -- they're mostly just of my family. So, I didn't think I really had anything to contribute.

Meanwhile, I had actually been thinking about buying an external hard drive to make backing up my photos more convenient (I had been backing them up periodically on CDs). The Common Craft video was pretty convincing for me. Using Flickr as your tool for backing up your photos was a great idea, which I hadn't really considered. I've got a collection of a couple thousand photos (and growing), so a tagging system is going to come in really handy for finding stuff. Often, I'm looking for a particular photo and have to scroll through my whole collection to find it.

This has, however, created a couple problems for me.

#1 Now, I've got to go through my whole collection, upload them all, and tag them all. Oh well, at least I have to look forward to a better system once I've put in all that work.

#2 The 100 MB monthly upload limit on Flickr is actually a barrier for me. I hit that limit after 86 photos. So, it'd probably take a couple years to get my whole collection on there. Of course, you're thinking, I could simply pay for a better account. But, who wants to pay for something I can get for free?

Finally, I'm probably underusing Flickr by setting all my photos to private, rather than public. I've got a wife who is not too keen on posting pictures to the internet. I guess she thinks people are going to see pictures of our kids and think, "wow, those are cute kids, I think I'll go steal them". So, for now, my pictures will be private.