Sinéad

Over coffee yesterday Darragh pointed out that he didn’t “Do the Flickr thing.” and I tried to explain why I thought he should. For someone that takes at least one photo a day and posts it to Twitter via a mobile photo sharing site he could greatly benefit from having somewhere like Flickr to permanently store and share his photos.  If it’s interesting enough to tweet then it shouldn’t be allowed to get lost and unshared after the tweet has washed away in the stream.

I myself have been using Twitpic to post the occasional interesting photo from my iPhone, but only when I’m on the move and I usually post these same photos to Flickr at a later date. Recently I’ve had much more free time to take photos with my “real” camera, and many of these photos are now on Flickr. Sometimes I’ll post a favourite photo to my blog and then link to the rest (rather than posting all of them as a long blog post). The reason I do this is the ability to tag, edit, archive and view stats – but there is so much more to it than that.

Flickr allows me to have a space online independent from my blog, my twitter, and my social networking. I have control on how they are displayed and archived (and can be as meticulous about this as I need), I can tell stories that go with the images, I can make notes to focus your attention to something special hidden within, and when I’m feeling nostalgic I can go back and review my own photostream based on tags I’ve created (see my tagcloud here). I can upload the well taken photos, and the badly taken ones too – if they say something that should be retold, they belong on my photostream.

However, what I really want to do with Flickr is share my photos, and see yours too. Today for instance I checked up on David’s travels in Beijing, Rory’s travels in Japan, I also met John’s gorgeous family, laughed at the bizarre mannequin Steph spotted, day-dreamed about Killiney Bay and wondered about the mind of an artist. Flickr can be a wonderful sneak peek into the lives of people you know and even strangers you might one day meet.

At the moment I only have 56 contacts (compare this to the almost 300 people I follow on twitter). I want more.  I want to follow your interesting lives, I want to comment on the things you’ve done and places you’ve seen. Almost every day I login to Flickr and check my contact’s uploads, the same way I login to Google Reader to check my RSS feeds – the difference is, photos can tell a totally different story, and can share the stories we don’t have the time to tell. Many of us lead busy lives, leaving us with not enough time or patience to blog as regularly as we would like, photoblogging is a taken a bit too seriously, but Flickr is a great way of sharing your life online without too much of a time or energy strain.

Plenty of bloggers that I read regularly will occasionally post their photos, but I always wonder about the photos that weren’t “good enough” for a blog post. Also, some bloggers are far better photographers than they realise and it’s a travesty that their incredible photos can disappear, lost in their blog post archives.

If you’re reading this and use Flickr add me. If you’re reading this and you post photos somewhere else, open a Flickr account and let us follow your life, taking a peek with each new upload.