Web 2.0 101 - Week 6 - Online Photo Sharing

OK, now this I could get into.  I finally broke down and bought a digital camera about a year ago and have a bunch of photos saved to my computer already waiting for me to “do something” with them.  In addition, for years I’ve been getting the CD of my photos along with the prints when I got my film developed.  They’re all lying in a pile on my desk waiting for me to “do something” with them.  I think I found “something.” 

Emailing photos to friends and family is too much of a pain because of file sizes and spam filters, and some of my family and friends still have dial up.  So to get around all these problems, I’ve been burning CDs of photos and mailing them to friends and family.  No more!  It doesn’t matter if they have broadband or dialup.  Everyone can receive an email with a URL in it.  Then they can go look at the photos at their leisure…or not. 

For use in a small hospital library?  Probably not.  Aside from posting photos of the library open house or Library Week Celebration, I’m not sure what else this could be used for.  One certainly can’t purchase a collection of copyrighted images of an open heart surgery and post them to Flickr to allow patrons easier access.  By the same token, for privacy and liability reasons, the hospital can’t photograph an open heart surgery and post the photos to Flickr for educational purposes.  Even if they could, chances are that the hospital’s IT department would block access anyway.

I guess I’m starting to sound like a broken record.  I like each of the different Web 2.0 services that we’ve looked at over the past six weeks, but with the exception of del.icio.us and services like Google Documents, I don’t see the services being usable, or even necessary in a small hospital library. 

Curmudegon that I am…

Tags: Photo Sharing