The Trouble With Sharing Photographs Online

Having recently spent several weeks processing a few hundred photos taken while on holiday in Tasmania, I then spent most of another evening uploading them to the Internet. The trouble was, where should I upload them too?

Top of the list is Flickr. I have it listed to the right, and I can upload a lot of photos there and generally network with other people who love photography.

Then there's Facebook; this one's more for my friends, as they nearly all have FB accounts these days, and the notifications when photos are uploaded help encourage them to come and have a look-see.

Finally there is Ringo. Not as high-profile as the above two, but a lot of people I know in the church are on it, and again it's good for keeping people updated when new photos come in - an ecclesiastical Facebook, if you will.

So the problem is threefold - firstly, choosing which photos to upload to which site; secondly, the time/bandwidth necessary to upload the photos to the site; and thirdly, and the biggest killer, the time necessary to tag and identify the photos. Flickr is the easiest, as Jeffrey Friedl's Export-to-Flickr plug-in for Lightroom will set tags, title and description from metadata already entered in Lightroom. Facebook can manage dates extracted from the EXIF data embedded in the photo by the camera, while Ringo can't manage anything.

I haven't mentioned the Kodak Gallery nor Picasa, since I don't use them for storage, although I have friends who do. So there's two more photo sharing sites to check out from time-to-time.

Isn't it about time someone started rationalising a few of these sites? Having so many sites to upload to, or to keep up-to-date with is not an easy job, especially when the site makes you key in your data all over again.