I’ve used Flickr for a long time and I like it a lot. It’s where I’ve shared photos, cultivated friendships and built communities around things I’m interested in. I’ve always felt that by sharing my photos openly and allowing others to use my works it helps foster and grow the community of sharing. This is important to me because this community is the same one I call upon when I need photos to use alongside a blog post. This morning that all changed.After uploading shots of my kids from yesterdays snow adventure I began thinking about how photos of my wife and kids are published to Flickr. Never have I set permissions who could see the photos. Never have I set permissions how those photos could be used. The photos have always been there for anyone to see and use as they’d like.
This morning I realized that’s probably not the safest thing for the welfare of my kids, especially since many of my photos of them are taken around the house and now contain geolocation information (not that my address and phone number hasn’t always been easily obtainable online either if you know where to look).
So this morning I changed all the permissions on Flickr for photos of my kids limiting their visibility to friends and family only.
I’m still open to letting people use my other photos. I don’t mind if they pick one of my photos to use in a guidebook or along with a blog post (with proper attribution of course) but as for the photos of my kids, they’re strictly hands off now.