I am a bad parent and photographer. God knows those who are into scrap booking would run in horror over the amount of pictures that are languishing on the memory card in my camera. I have uploaded some to flickr so that I can share them with friends and family, but for the most part they are living in photo limbo. This isn't a new phenomenon for me. I was guilty of this type of behavior when I had camera that used regular film. I was slightly better then at getting photos developed because I knew the film aged and it couldn't sit in my camera for months/years and still yield decent snapshots.

As I have been slowly but surely migrating my pictures to an online account, I notice that I am also very slow to print out pictures and put them in a photo album or frames. Again this is no new revelation. Before with regular film I would eagerly look at the newly developed pictures and then put the envelope off to the side of my desk to await a photo album or frames. Inevitably the pictures found themselves in a shoe box labeled photos and the year (maybe).

Flickr has now become my digital shoebox and I am slightly discomforted by that fact. For some reason I feel the need to have hard copies of the photos. Having them in flickr makes them less tangible to me. I can remember when I was young, I used to page through my parents wedding album laughing at my dad's very 70's mustache and glasses. I marveled at how the people looked so young and giggled at the styles, peach dresses and ruffley tuxes. When my dad passed away, my brother, sister and I went through family albums and many shoeboxes searching for those moments captured on film that depicted my dad as we knew him, comforting ourselves with the good memories.

A few years back I had uploaded many photos into my Yahoo account. However, Yahoo is eliminating photo storing and sharing in their accounts. Users are given a variety of places to migrate their photos, flickr, photobucket, shutterfly, snapfish, and Kodak Gallery. However, if you don’t do anything by September 20, 2007 your photos on Yahoo will be gone.

This begins to make me question the idea of permanence in the digital world. As medical librarians we have all debated about the print vs. online access. We ask questions about who is indexing and maintaining quality online images, websites, and multimedia. Permanence is important to us. I am not advocating that everything online must be saved. In addition to the headless, blurry, and thumb in front of the lens photos still clogging up my memory card there are quite a few not so great shots, ones where there is no obvious flaw like a thumb in the frame but the person is turned funny or has their eyes closed. There are also a lot of near duplicate images. After all, how many pictures do I need of me standing in front of various mountainous areas from my trip to Boulder, Colorado? But for every headless family photo there is also a keeper. You know the keepers when you see them. At the core of our debating is the question, “What happens if it all disappears?” Like the precious family photo of the baby with cake smeared on his face, where do the great online only medical articles or videos go when their digital shoebox disappears?