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My Online Photo Strategy

A few months ago I had a dilemma… I wanted to post some photos of my vacation, but wasn’t sure where to put them. I have a Flickr account, Facebook account and MobileMe account, all of which provide this capability, but I didn’t want to duplicate them everywhere. In the end, I decided to use all of those services, each with a different group of photos. Here’s the breakdown:

• Flickr is where I put my “artsy” pictures, mainly the ones that I take with my Digital SLR.
• Facebook is where I put my “best of” personal pictures. I try to limit the number here since most Facebook friends probably aren’t interested in going through 200 vacation photos.
• MobileMe is where I put all of my personal pics. This is primarily for family who doesn’t mind going through tons of photos. It also provides lots (10 GB) of storage and the option to download high rez versions of each photo.

All of this centers around iPhoto, where I store everything. I have two separate libraries, one with all of my personal photos, and one with all my DSLR photos. I usually end up taking a ton of mediocre photos with the DSLR in order to score a few keepers, so I didn’t want to have all that mixed into my main library. After everything is in iPhoto, I use several tools to get them out onto the web:

• FlickrExport to upload photos directly to Flickr from iPhoto. It costs £12, but it’s well worth it for the convenience it provides.
• Facebook Exporter to upload photos directly to Facebook from iPhoto.
• iPhoto’s built in Web Galleries to upload photos to MobileMe.

Once they’re on the web, I want to let people know about them. For Facebook photos, friends are automatically notified through my timeline, and I use My Flickr to do the same for Flickr photos. For my MobileMe stuff, I’ll usually just send a Web Gallery link to anyone who may be interested.

Well there you have it. This took a little time to research and set up, but now that I’ve done the work, I have an organized photo collection that’s pretty easy to manage.