Where did all my pictures go?!

Shame on me. I'm so disappointed in myself right now. I've been utilizing my social media sites (MySpace and Facebook) to house my pictures. Not a bad plan, except that they changed the formatting. I can't move pictures from those sites into my NEW flickr account.

So why, oh why, have I never used a free photo sharing site? I had pictures stored on a desktop computer that died. Those are gone. I put pictures on MySpace that are now gone. Literally gone, all I see are ? where pictures used to be. I have pictures on Facebook that are from my various escapades and they are STUCK in Facebook.

My daughter used Flickr and she told me how cool it was. But, she's young and not so bright. Right? Absolutely wrong. My digital native daughter should have been a bit more forceful with her mother. I would have had my Flickr account and not lost all my precious pictures. Deep sigh.

The past is the past and it's time to look forward to the future. Get over what I've lost and look to what I'll gain. So why in the world would I choose Flickr over Picasa and Shutterfly? I honestly thought I'd select Picasa because it popped up when I signed up for my Google Reader account. I even reviewed Shutterfly to see how that looked. But, when I looked at the upload features on my phone - there was the answer. Flickr was preloaded. Decision made. Yes, I probably should have done a tad bit more research. But, in my defense, my phone is my camera.

I started loading pictures into Flickr and became completely wrapped up in loading the pictures I had on my old laptop. The next thing I know, seven hours have passed. It was fun looking through my memories once again. I had the most fun adding pictures to the map! Now I have a challenge to go through and scan pictures from when my family was stationed at other bases and the fun places we went.  I still need to work on my Flickr page and make sure I have pictures tagged and in the proper set.

I believe it can be used in an educational setting when doing research for a school paper. You can search through your friends and see if they've been to a location. Then you have someone with first hand knowledge. Not only that, you'll have brand new media to preview and use. I need to work on my tags and get them all set. As I was working through this assignment I kept thinking about the William W. Winpisinger Education and Technology Center in Hollywood, MD. It's the IAM's educational facility and in my other class I really talked it up. I want to share that set of pictures with everyone in my class. :)

Enjoy flipping through my memories!!

Update: I created a slide show through SlideRocket. I hope you enjoy.