Photo Sharing

A central reason I have stayed with Facebook as long as I have is my intense attachment to the photo albums I've made. These are all the loving work of several hours, each with extensive captioning and tagging. I want there to be a place outside of FB where I can share them the same way, but maintain control over who sees them. From what I've discovered so far, assuring permission a priori to only a select group is only possible if I email each member of that group. The problem is I don't want to bug my friends with announcements of photo uploads. I just want them to have the option of popping over to Picasa or Flickr and being able to access my albums with no difficulty. Also, it seems that if I make any album private, my friends and family will have to create an account at the hosting site, which is an inconvenience, especially given that people already have too many screen names and sites to register for. There may be a way around this if I make only those pictures that are visible on my blog accessible as an album. That way the public content is identical in either place.

I really hope that OpenID can gather some steam. I really like the idea of being able to use one online sign-in procedure wherever you go. If, say, Picasa, were to adopt this, people could sign in to see my albums there but use an extant ID to do so (perhaps from Yahoo! or Livejournal). No need to create a new account.