Flickr... or Fade?

Why leave a legacy when you can share your photos today?

What do you think happens to archived blogs? Do they float out there in cyberspace forever--just waiting for future generations of archeologists and genealogists to crack them open and begin exploring the brightly colored contents of our forgotten lives like so many Easter eggs?

Something tells me that is not the case. Something tells me our blogs, all our carefully collected, scanned, tagged, labelled, and described photos and words could go at any time, like so many Web sites before them, whether by design or by accident. At a recent Interlibrary Loan conference, for example, a Web 2.0 speaker remarked that she had lost all her del.icio.us links at one point, through some internal del.icio.us error. "Be sure and have them backed up," she said. How? I wondered at the time. As bookmarks? Heaven forbid. That would be going backwards. OK. OK. Maybe I'm the Voice of Doom. Or, more accurately, the Snotty, Sarcastic Voice of Doom. Or maybe I just need a new screen identity, blogging persona, nom de blog, or user ID—for next week's assignment: GlassHalfEmptyGirl. Is that taken? Whatever. Read on. It gets more positive towards the end.

Whatever the case, when I explore photo-sharing sites like Flickr, that is what I think about. Flickr, I would propose, is all about today, people, not yesterday, not tomorrow. Sites like these, I think, will come and go, occasionally losing stuff along the way, no doubt. Is that good or is it bad? Who knows? On the one hand, we have access to, and can share, many photos, places, and people we might not otherwise see. I submit, for example, the tale of Cornelius O'Shea's photo album. Cornelius O'Shea is my husband's grandfather, and he kept surprisingly meticulous and beautiful scrapbooks and photoalbums in the 1920s and 1930s, wonderland windows onto worlds with flappers, cross-dressing ladies, vintage ferryboats, family-style roadside diners of yesterday, and some of those honkin' big bad-ass Automobiles that could push upwards of 30 miles per hour. (Cornelius also kept every single speeding ticket he ever got--and there must be at least 50, including personal notes from the local police reminding him not to frighten the neighbors by roaring down the local roads at such breakneck velocities--proving definitively, once-and-for-all, that the need for speed must be genetically passed along the male line.) Anyway, Corny O'Shea's legacy lives in the possession of one person right now, and that person's not really sharing it much. With Flickr all those photos, pages, and even the speeding tickets I suppose could be scanned, posted, and shared with sons and daughters, cousins, sisters, and others who have never seen them or who would like to remember good old Corny, now that he is gone, through his photo collection. Wonderful.

On the flip side of that scenario, I've found Flickr to be rather time intensive. Am I going to have time for scrapbooking-for-posterity if I spend all my time scanning, downloading, titling, and describing my photos online, not to mention figuring out how to navigate Flickr and properly tag, create sets, and group my photos? Actually... the answer to that could be yes, although a firm and resounding way-cool would require a lot more investigation (that probably isn't going to happen) on my part. However, aside from the obvious stack of photos, files on your hard drive, and back-up disk (just wait, they'll probably replace the technology that gave you that disk, and then it'll be obsolete, too), Flickr appears to offer some interesting options for packaging your online photo albums into books, cards, and more. You may decide to explore it further, but whatever you decide to do, be sure and back up your materials, lest we all become ghosts in the machine.

P.S. In case you are wondering about the photo of the young man with the goat that heads up this blog entry, in the spirit of keeping alive the legacy at least of Cornelius O'Shea, that is my husband at about age 10 with his goat Sundance. As long as I was on the subject of photos—lost in the void of cyberspace or otherwise—I thought I would throw this one to the winds of posterity, and see what happened. No special reason. I just like this photo and have no other venue for sharing it. I should add that I always knew if I ever got married I would marry a man who loved animals. And I did. If you are really a sucker for romantic stories, ask me about me about that one some day. For now, I invite you to view photos of our wedding day on Flickr. Please be kind and bear in mind we went from work to wedding that day. No time to have my hair done and all that frilly stuff: Wedding of the century—NOT