Professionally, I share pictures occasionally on my Twitter feed and on this blog. I save websites with images to Diigo. I haven’t shared enough images to warrant using a program like Instagram to put them all in one place.

Personally, I share many pictures with friends and family on Facebook. At some point, I need to weed out some of the images from years ago. Facebook is really my conduit for sharing so much.

Sharing my work

In my spare time, when I have some, I love to scrapbook. This is my non-digital distraction. I love finding just the right paper to match the photos and putting together powerful pages. I am not an artist in the sense of someone who can paint or draw with skill.  But, I feel my scrapbooks show an artistic creativity that captures moments of time.

My scrapbooks are primarily focused on my children. When the pages are complete and I finish a book, I scan them into digital format. I do this to protect the work from wear and accidents like fire. I also do this so that I can put together printed books like I did when we left our daycare after five years.

I also wanted to share the images with friends and family. Four years ago, I looked at every public service like Instagram, Flickr, Photobucket, Walgreens, Snapfish, Picasa, and Shutterfly. I read the black and white of the fine print of the privacy and sharing documents. In each service, there was some language that gave up rights to your photos in some way to the provider— or made them available in an internet search format.  I did not like that idea. These were pictures of my children.

Instead, I created my own webpage. I used iWeb, which no longer exists in the Mac iOS. But, this way, I could publish my pages, format the layout, and keep control over what was shared. While the images are out on the internet, the webpage and images are not housed on another program’s site. I have kept the site out of Google search results, though I just found at least one page has been indexed for search results.

My images are important to me. I know how often users on the internet just copy/paste and use anything because it’s published on the web. When I share images, I want them to be for a specific audience and leaving as small of a digital footprint as possible.