Hey! Where are my images now? Do you ever get the feeling the files you upload on the internet get lost sometimes?

Take for example, your pictures. A few years back, it seemed like everyone had their pictures uploaded on photobucket. These days, they’re either on flickr or facebook’s picture albums. In a few years further, who knows where you will be hosting your pictures. Worse yet, will you remember where all your pictures are? Because I won’t. Of course, this won’t be a concern to you if you are those kinds of people who spend their weekends managing and organizing your pictures online, moving them from one image host to another, but for the majority of us out there - we have no interest in wasting our time.

I find it odd that the majority of my generation, who are currently in their 20’s, still do not own personal websites (yeah, yeah - I know I’m a bit late on this as well). If they had, this wouldn’t be much of a problem. However, it is a problem today since there is an increase in the demand for social networks. More and more people are relying on such networks in their daily lives. However, with social networks comes the ability to share with the world who you are. And what better way to show who you are then to publish those pictures of you sipping on some gin and juice at a pre-party party?

Here lies the problem: with the way social networks are currently designed, there is no way to upload your pictures to multiple websites without having to do it more than once. The only way I see this being done is having social networking websites use a single, decentralized image host across the internet via a web-application or some kind of a script. However, this can only be done if the website developers choose to use that particular image host instead of creating their own. I’m sorry, but I don’t see this happening soon. Although, it may work in the future when websites give users more freedom in their personal pages - think Geocities, with obvious restrictions in the overall layout of the pages to retain consistency. We do not want another shitty Myspace page with seizure-inducing colour schemes).

With this freedom, users can select a wide variety of picture album widgets that allow the use of HTML/IMG codes as a way to display different kinds of pictures from different hosts. This way users that already have most of their pictures on flickr but also have a few albums lying around elsewhere can show all of their files! It also allows people to freely choose and migrate to-and-from different image hosts!

Simple, yet effective.

- Peter Kao