Photo Sharing (4 of 23 Things)

The holidays have me behind and here's my attempt to catch up. I fooled around with several photo sharing websites (Flickr and Shutterfly) and was pleased with the results from my trial picture searches. Also impressive were the tools available to improve the composition and quality of your photos -although I believe my Mac's iPhoto will do much the same and keep my pictures on my own computer. I also realize you have the option to keep your online pictures private, but my suspicious side (I'd rather not call it my paranoid nature) makes me leery about posting my personal pictures on the internet. I believe you should consider anything that is uploaded or sent electronically as public domain. I rarely pay bills online either. So with that said, I'm pretty sure I'm in the minority and that I probably wouldn't be personally making use of the Photo Sharing Thing.

As for library use of this Web 2.0 Thing, many marketing opportunities present themselves. Many patrons will enjoy seeing online slideshows of themselves and their families participating in library programs. Also showing the larger community the variety and turnout for library programming impresses civic leaders and increases public opinion resulting in more library funding. Looking at various public libraries already taking advantage of photo sharing, I found a majority of pictures focused exclusively on audience members - especially children. The Marathon County Public Libraries in Wisconsin prominently posted a photo and video release form, others did not. I have to wonder if releases were obtained from every person in the pictures. Am I a privacy nut? - I don't know, but I don't want to unexpectedly find myself in any online pictures - what's the chance that wouldn't happen? Also, a few of the libraries appear to allowed patrons to share their unrelated photos via the library link - what is that about?

I believe the utmost care must be used when deciding what pictures to upload to a library or photo sharing site to protect both the library and the patron.