Photo albums used to be sacred documents that families treated with a certain kind of awe, which usually meant that they would be shoved away on a high shelf until family occasions, when they would be taken out and looked at for a few hours. With the innovations that have taken place in photography, the Internet now offers us photo hosting – an album on the Internet.
Some of these albums are, or can be made, publicly viewable. The website Flickr has become a social networking site in all but name, as you can sign up to view a poster’s new photos and leave comments on the ones they have posted. This has made the site hugely popular and gives something of a “blog” element to the photo hosting idea.
Then there are other photo hosting sites that allow you simply to deposit your photographs there and, using the automatically-generated links, can post the photos to a blog, an online forum or on a dedicated website. This is a good way of saving on bandwidth and has the added advantage that you can keep your photographs password-protected and free up hard drive space.
The Internet is often blamed for published content decreasing in quality, but what is often not appreciated is the fact that it has given photography something of a shot in the arm by persuading more people to give it a try. For those who are willing to look around, there are some excellent photographs online.
