As a hobby photographer I take a lot of photos. I own a Nikon D70, and my Nokia N95 also has a decent camera, which means that when I first get started I take a lot of photos. My external hard drive has something like 38000 photos and I don’t want to loose any of them. Also, I would like to have access to them whenever I need them. If it’s at work, at home, when visiting friends and family or even when I’m out traveling I would like to have my collection at hand – either because I want to use one of them for something or if I want to show some of them to someone. But I don’t want to carry the external hard drive with me wherever I go. This is where the wonderful cloud comes to the rescue!

A few years ago, a fellow student introduced me to Flickr - the online photo storage and sharing service owned by Yahoo. I signed up and for a few years stayed on the free limited account. I only uploaded my best photos and shared them with everyone. Didn’t get many hits though, but that wasn’t so important. Earlier this year a friend of mine show me how he used Flickr for a street art photo blogging project. He’d use his Nokia N95 to take pictures of every day things he encountered on the street and upload them directly to Flickr using the phone’s pre-installed “Share online”-feature. I immediately got hooked and started taking photos and sharing them much the same way he was. It didn’t take long for my free account to fill up and I quickly upgraded to a pro account with unlimited storage and bandwidth.

And yesterday it struck me: With a no-limit account on Flickr, and several instances of “if I’d only had my external hard drive with all my photos on”-moments, why don’t I just upload everything to the cloud? Then I’ll have easy access from everywhere, I can share my photos with anyone who might want to see them and my photos are backed up – all at the same time. So today I started the tedious task of uploading 70 gigabytes of photos to Flickr. Am I going to finish this week? Probably not. And do I have a huge task of sorting, tagging and naming all my photos? Yes, most definitively. But I do believe it is worth it, and it represents my first step towards real utilization of the cloud. Now, if I could only find a smoother way of eliminating duplicates…