Photos rediscovered...

For years I used Webshots for online photo galleries - until last year, when with relatively little notice, they changed to a new format and deleted all the photos that had been on there for years. There were apparently a couple of emails sent out warning people of this but in common with many others I never saw these - the first I knew of it was when I logged in to drop some photos in there one day only to find that they - and all my others - had disappeared. Thankfully everything I had there was also backed up elsewhere - I'm pretty careful about backing up - as a general rule the photos on the laptop get backed up both to the PC and to an external hard drive too, and the PC gets backed up to the external drive.  I also leave the "decent" pics on memory cards too - rather than formatting and using cards again, once my 8gb cards are full I store them and start a new one. Obviously I also have the website, but I only put a tiny selection of the shots I take up there - it's not really for storage.

As a result of the demise of Webshots I've been investigating Flickr again. I've had a Flickr account for years, but as you used to have to pay to get a practical and useable account (Flickr Pro) I never made that much use of it. Now though it's changed - offering a full terabyte of storage, and lots of great ways to organise your photos too. As well as appearing on your main photostream photos can also be placed into "sets", and then those sets can be organised into "collections" too - so for example each years Hebrides trip has its own set, and then those are combined together into a collection too. As I add another year's photos, I just create the set, then drag the set into the collection - easy!

The good thing about all this has been finding photos I'd long since forgotten about lurking about - some of them *might* have made it to the blog before, and they're probably on my website somewhere, but I rarely seem to look back over other stuff that's on the computers. We do transfer holiday stuff into photobooks - the modern day equivalent of photo albums I guess, but we've even got slack about those over the last couple of years. That's the sad side of the digital age I guess - the number of shots just sitting on peoples hard drives gathering virtual dust.

If you'd like to take a look at the stuff I have on Flickr, then I can be found by clicking THIS LINK - while you're there why not take a wander about and see what other people have in their albums - there is some truly awesome photography on there, just see where your mouse takes you!

Robyn