Changing my photo-sharing platform

In the early years of the new millennium when the world-wide-web was still a teenager, digital photography was becoming more affordable to the general public. In 2003 I bought my first digital camera, a Nikon Coolpix that had a 3.2-megapixel resolution, which was considered a sufficiently high specs at the time. It was a simple point-n-shoot compact and cost upwards of RM1k, a princely sum which had taken me a few months to save up. The dSLR was still out of my range.

With the ease and popularity of taking digital pictures, photo-sharing websites came into existence on the internet. The most popular platform at that time was Flickr. Many photos shared on Flickr were taken by serious photographers who were possibly professionals too. The high standard of digital pics somewhat scared me a little so I opted to upload my photos on a different site called Photobucket.

I am not sure how many photos I saved to Photobucket. I can't remember my login password and I'm not sure if the photos are still there. A bit of online checking reveals that Photobucket still exists but of course, at a much smaller scale than what it used to be. They have not deleted any old photographs so there is a possibility that I may be able to view what I had uploaded. I just need to explore how to do so.

With the advent of picture-taking capability on smartphones, the convenience of sharing the photos directly from the phone meant the emergence of new photo-sharing apps catered principally for the mobile market. In September 2015, I signed up on EyeEm, which I blogged about here -> Social Networking for Photographers. I uploaded quite a number of photos to that platform, mostly good quality shots taken on my dSLR. After a few years with EyeEm, my interest waned and I decided to deregister. I'm not sure what happened to the photos that I had shared. Are they deleted or does EyeEm have rights to use them? Who knows, it is probably in the terms and conditions (small print) which most of us do not read and simply tick 'accept' when we signed up.

Apart from photo-sharing sites, I also created a photo-blog using Blogger. It was called Oldstock's Images and a link was available on a sidebar on this blog. The objective was to display some of my photos which I think are worth sharing. Just pictures and a short caption. Brief or no write-up.

I have decided to shut down that blog too. I have not updated it since March 2017 and it hardly has any traffic. A total of 46 pics in 20 posts were on that blog with the first photos uploaded in May 2010. The last pic was a sunset shot taken at Lumut, Perak in March 2017. Perhaps I'll share them again on a different platform in future, who knows.

I am now on Instagram... yes, I know, only now, you ask? Have been on IG since December of 2020, so still very much a newbie. Although initially set up as a photo-sharing app, I note that many people use Instagram for marketing and commercial purposes. I do not have such intentions, so the number of followers or activity ranking is not important to me. What I do appreciate is the huge number of quality photographs on varying subject matter that can be viewed.

How long will I last as an Instagram user? We shall see...

Lumut sunset captured on Sony Xperia mobile phone