Flickr and Dropshots and Photobucket, Oh My!

Online photo sharing is not new to me. My brother introduced me to Dropshots.com several years ago and it's what our family uses to share photos. That site is password protected, and I paid for a "premium" account, so I've got a lot of pictures there. I've found that I'm using it less and less, however, as either no one's looking at my photos, or they just don't leave comments. I don't like putting things out there if no one's going to look at them. On the other hand, my sister-in-law's family has a great network and they leave lots of feedback for each other. It's more fun that way.

I also use Photobucket.com for public posts, such as Internet message boards and my Travels with Children blog. It is not password-protected, includes no identifying information, and I've tried really hard to keep all the pictures there very anonymous, including not showing my kids' faces in any photos.

I don't have qualms about using the Internet for most anything, but I really do try to protect our privacy, especially that of our children. They have enough to worry about without their mom putting pictures of them on the Internet for all the world to see, steal, and alter.

Any photos I post to my Flickr account will also be very anonymous. If I can get Flickr to integrate with either Blogger or Wordpress, I'll try it out for adding blog photos, but for now, Photobucket works well so I'm not too eager to switch horses midstream. I do like Flickr's easy tag-adding but that's the only real benefit I've seen to it compared to the other sites I've used.

Am I the only one who's just a little disconcerted about the amount of detail available about my photos? Not only is the type of camera shown, but the aperture, date and time, and resolution. I suppose for serious photographers this information is relevant, but for my snapshot life I'd rather have an option to repress that information.