Lovely views
Photo by Farnooshtango.

Okay, so if you start reading blogs, inevitably you’ll find some reference to or even wind up at flickr.com. If you’re reading this, you know exactly what I’m talking about.

So I decided to check it out, being the Web virtuoso that I am. I signed up and this is a post I created from Flickr that posted directly to my blog. Neat. Technology is cool. And scary. How the hell did it work? Well, I have my suspicions, which are likely correct; but I’m going to pretend I’m amazed.

On the cool side, you can do what I just described above: either send some photo you find on Flickr to your blog, or upload your own photos to Flickr and send those to your blog. That’s cool.

However, why do I want my photos on Flickr? What does Flickr want from me? I signed up and they didn’t ask me for money. That’s cool. But where do they get money and what happens if the site goes belly up? Suddenly all my blogs with cool photos (assuming I blog and use Flickr a lot) will be riddled by broken image links. Not so cool.

Another downside is having photos located in two places: on your computer and on Flickr. Or you might even have photos in three places: your computer, your Web server, and Flickr. Sounds like photo management mayhem.

Still, I guess Flickr makes it easy to share your photos. And that’s something the majority of non-Web savvy folks will appreciate.

As for me, I fall into the Web savvy group (I know, people don’t really say Web savvy anymore. I think they’re against words with two Vs). So I’m going to keep my photos on my server, where I know they’ll be safe.