I changed my usual path down to the beach this week, pushing harder than usual during my morning run, and I found myself repeating a song in my head. You know the one; the one you cannot stop replaying in your head the moment you hear it?
You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” from the Rolling Stones, was the song channeling my serial runner mind and when I returned home I’d forgotten all about it. I was dressing for dinner with friends, turned on the XM radio, and wouldn’t you know it, the same song played.
Forgot about the song again, then during the evening, one of my friends pulled out his book satchel and a photo album slipped onto the centre of the restaurant dining table with a dull thud. It flipped open-faced and the four of us saw 4 x 6 snapshots of his vacation to Harry Potter at Walt Disney World. The pictures were crisp, and breathtakingly clear. After our oohs and ahhs, one friend asked if he was planning to upload them onto a web photo site, like Flickr. He said he had no intention of putting his photographs, which were keenly amazing, onto an Internet photo sharing site. Our friend’s a multimedia artist and his answer surprised me. The kicker was he had other photographs that would fetch a pretty commission; however what made me double-take was the image he had placed as an insert at the back of the photo album, “You Can’t Get What You Want,” the same song that had raced through my mind while I ran.
I shared my sentiment, we started singing the tune and I recognized there really must be times when messages come in sets of threes. We sang that ’69 Mick Jagger – Keith Richards rock melody, together, in a crowded restaurant that crisp Saturday night and I redacted why the lyrics by the Stones left such an impression on me.
It was the last refrain, “you get what you need.”
Creating a space for our self in our lives can be challenging, and with digital information, data can be archived most readily in what seems a multitude of devices. Memory keys, portable hard drives, even Internet mail, can house data for any impromptu desire. What about storing online data? Is it really a means a person must have?
I think, yes. Photo albums are wonderful way to treasure keepsakes, and with memorabilia like photographs, any method to store them safely and securely may quite possibly be photographer’s grail.
Flickr, for example allows not only archiving for pictures taken – it allows anyone who uses it the ability to tag their images. Once added into the website’s file queue, this “metadata” can describe the image(s) along with a user-selected destination as “public” or “private.”
My friend could archive his digital photography at a moment’s notice. Flickr not only stores data information, it is a community. Persons can share their photography with just one friend, or a group of friends, or an entire collective. Photos can be presented as a best of collection– you can send photos from as varied and creative of places you can imagine: your mobile device(s), your laptop, Mac, or PC, or your camera phone.
Serial entrepreneurs can drive information about their creative style directly into their social media and website, and professional collectives by sharing these kinds of photos – by Internet mail or even via RSS feeds. One connection shared within a social type of photo sharing site, that’s really what sharing is isn’t it, something we like to do because it’s “social,” and the possibilities to expand our creative worlds are the sky.
Organising photos with specific information will make photos easy to find and if the work’s original, he could let the images be reused, and the credit would be his own. Best is, sites like Flickr are free.
Artists and photographers could promote themselves just by sharing their creative work. Aggregate all their images onto a source like Flickr and a way to share their latest and best is a click away. When word about a person spreads, all she or he would do is offer a link to their Flickr and an album or portfolio is shared brilliantly.
Get online, share your photos, best the Rolling Stones, and create something yourself that everyone “needs.”
I’ve been using Flickr for years now. It’s still one of my favourite. Alternatively, Google Picasa, or what may be Google Photos for Google+ is a nice alternative in the future.