I went to the Flickr account I share with B this morning, to fetch some photos for my other heavily-ignored project, and saw that he’d added a buttload of really old farting-around photos, and was highly dismayed. There’s nothing wrong with the pictures themselves, some of them are pretty cool, it’s just that I hate That Flickr Usr and don’t want to be him.
I use the RSS fed for my contacts, and part of the problem there is that because it’s a shared account, there are people in there I don’t know and half the time I don’t even know what I’m supposed to be looking at and am not personally invested (or in many cases even know how) in finding out. (This is why the basic functionality of Flickr is so brilliant, it’s just probably that we should have gotten three accounts instead of one.) B had just finally gotten all his SXSW pictures in (which are exempted from dismay on the grounds that they were always meant to go up, it just takes us a while to get anything done), and we now have a bunch of contacts that neither one of us know. I assure you that those people are probably wicked irritated about all the random stuff of ours that just showed up in their feeds/Your Contacts’ Latest Photos, and they think we are stupid, boring people. Because that’s what I think when other people do it.
Not that it’s my place to dictate what other people do with their Flickr accounts; I am hardly an arbiter of cool or even sorta-okay. But one of the beauties of digital photography is that you can take 20 photos to get one really great one - post the great one publicly and put the rest somewhere else.
Also, I use Flickr as a way to keep up with people I never talk to, and I know other people do that with ours as well. Since Flickr makes it either difficult or impossible - I haven’t figured out which yet - to insert things where they belong chronologically, we’re having those boring stupid lives now. And whatever with tagging being the wave of the future and all, and woo hoo for the searching, but if I don’t know you went hang-gliding before you uploaded all 34 pictures of your broken fence plank AND that you tagged those photos “hanggliding” or whatever, it does me no good.
I think the moral of this story is that I’m probably far too concerned with my public Internet face, and now I can make other people paranoid that I’m judging them for their Flickr photos.