Flickr

Teens and Chocolate
Originally uploaded by Marysville Library Teens

I've been using a Flickr account to backup pictures I take of teen events at the library for a while. I think it's a great way to organize your photos and it makes them so easy to share. I particularly like how you can organize the photos into sets and then share a whole set with someone. I used this when we were working on the Harry Potter party. All the teen volunteers wanted to see the pictures we took and Flickr made it easy to email them all a link to that set. Although I haven't played around with it too much, I also enjoy how you can send flickr slide shows to your blogs, mysace pages, etc. And the upload tools are fabulous--making it so easy to upload all the pictures from a teen program at once instead of selecting each one individually (like I have to do when adding pictures to the library's MySpace page). I also appreciate that I can set some photos to private while making other's public. This way I can back up every picture I've taken while only showing the ones I have a photo release for.

The one complaint I have with flickr is that you can only do so much with the free account. You can only organize your photos into three sets. So in my case, everything after our first couple events is in one big list (making it NOT as easy to share pictures from a specific event). And, perhaps most annoying, only the most recent 200 photos you upload are available. You can still get to them if you pay to upgrade to a Pro Account ($25 a year), but otherwise, you have to delete photos to get to them. It doesn't take long to reach 200 pictures and this really limits the use of a flickr account as backup. These are just a couple of the problems I've started to run in to in using my library flickr account. It may be time to ask the Friends to pay for an upgrade to a Pro Account.

In writing this blog, I've started wondering why I don't use flickr for my personal photos. Probably because the thought of the time it would take to upload my hundreds of personal photos (my dad used a slide/negative scanner to scan in all our print pictures from the last 20 years or so) on to flickr is a little daunting. But the upload tools would make it easier and the backup would be great. And I sure would be upset if I lost them all to a computer crash!