Photos

Since getting a cease and desist from Playboy (never a dull moment around here) and Flickr rapping my knuckles with a first and final warning, I’ve been slow to start uploading photographs again. Pretty much all the photos Flickred in January where thrown there by Jess. Some of them I haven’t even looked at yet. This isn’t simply a reluctance to use Flickr - it remains one of the few services that changed the way I use the Internet - but because I’ve been messing around with video more and more since I got back from NYC my regular camera has gotten kinda dusty.

But the warning from Flickr and in particular the line “further action that may include termination without warning” has given me pause for thought. A lot of the content of my Flickr stream are the only copies I have. We’re talking memories here - not only in the sentimental sense, but also in the ‘I’m an old old man and can’t remember where I’ve been’ sense.

Finding an easy way to back up almost 8,000 photos, the vast majority of which were indeed taken by us, in case another copyright infringement leads to account deletion has proven to be a bit of a headache. One thing I should mention is that the Playboy photos were put up on Flickr in order to find out where they originated from. I was curious as to how such a grim little war movie ended up with a promo shoot involving Michael Caine, Denholm Elliott and a bevy of naked ladies.

Playboy let me know in no uncertain terms that the photos belonged to them. Mystery solved.

So as long as I don’t do anything similar within Flickr I’m OK, right? Well this is still a concern as I get sent promotional photos from movies all the time and rather than get them hotlinked from my own server I stick em up on Flickr and change the copyright to the rights holder. All it takes is one over efficient Flickr/Yahoo employee to put a red flag over one of these photos and there go all our photos.

I should also add I have no problem with Flickr regarding this. In fact I’m involved in two upcoming events with them. But seeing as there isn’t a single elegant back up solution I’m now looking at going into my Flickr stream and relocating all the screencaps and promotional crap from the account. Tiresome to say the least.

I really need to replace all these external drives and towering stacks of DVDs with something tidy (but huge) then I can keep on top of archiving my own photographs and videos. And then there are the boxes of actual photographs that we want to digitise…

The last time I was ‘home’ I found a neglected photo album and saved as many of the photos as I could.

A lot of these are old Polaroid shots of me as a kid - wearing an A Team jumper, Ghostbusters shirt, playing with Lorne Greene action figures(?!), leaning on dinosaurs - so I was a little saddened to read the other day that Polaroid are now abandoning the film business. My favourite camera was always a Polaroid, but the expensive film made sure it was used sparingly over the years. Watching the photograph develop before your eyes was part of the charm of course and it’s a shame to think of that process as now almost obsolete. That said I won’t be heading to eBay to find a ‘new’ camera and the final stocks of film. There’ll be enough geeks doing just that right now.

I did stumble across this video though…

Maybe I’ll have a quick look on eBay.