Flickr and photo sharing

I thought I knew a bit about about photo sharing, because I use photobucket quite a bit, mainly as a way of uploading my own photos, or other images I take a fancy to (legally allowed ones, that is) to a joint blog I am involved in. I have also encouraged family members to use it as a way of sharing photos "... the tinsel is still all over the floor, and here are the photos of the Xmas party for those half a world away ..." but Facebook has pretty much taken over that role for us, mainly because the only members of our family interested in the photos are also on Facebook. Facebook is less secure than photo sharing sites, IMHO but I have grey hair, what would I know about the Internet and security?

I had a look around flickr and the various tutorials today. I take the point in the commoncraft video (another thing I love about the Net) about backup of all one's precious photos onto something like Flickr, but it does sound like a lot of work .. I'm just a grasshopper regarding photos, not an ant.

I found some photos of a place we recently went camping at on Flickr before we set off to camp there, and so knew what it had looked like recently, and spotted a couple of nice vistas which we subsequently saw ... and made inferior photos of, of our very own.

Anyway, here's the link to the photo I chose from flickr:

This photo is available for anyone to see ... and so beautiful it makes me want to go to the Maldives ... now!

For the library, it could be a way to keep a progress blog of renovations, alterations, a way of showcasing particular architectural aspects of the LRC - we have a great comunity-created mural in our library that I'd love more people to appreciate ... since we saved it during the recent renovations ... as well as other promotional activities, displays. Library X's 2009 BookWeek display could be a spark for library Y's in 2010 and no need to save photos on our overworked servers.

I notice that the National Library invites the community to contribute images using Flickr, and has archived many ... this could be a useful adjunct to Local Studies collections.

Lecturers could set up resource banks of study-related images, and protect them so that only the audience they chose could see them.