Photo albums were once sacred documents that families addressed with a certain sort of awe, which usually meant that they would be put aside on a high rack till family events, when they would be taken out and viewed for a few hours.
With the innovations that have taken place in photography, the Internet now offers us photo hosting - an album on the net.
A few of these albums are, or can be created, openly viewable.
The site Flickr has turned into a social networking website in all but name, as you possibly can sign up to look at a poster's fresh pictures and then leave remarks on the ones they've posted.
It has made the website really famous and provides something of a "blog" element to the photo hosting idea.
And then there are other photo hosting websites that permit you simply to deposit your photographs there and, using the automatically-generated links, can publish the photographs to a blog, a web-based discussion board or on a specific site.
This is a good way of saving on bandwidth and has the added advantage that you can keep your pictures password-protected and free up hard drive space.
The Internet is frequently blamed for published content reducing in quality, but what is often not appreciated is the truth that it has provided photography a little something of a shot in the arm by convincing more people take a try.
For individuals who are willing to browse around, there are several outstanding photos online.
Saving Your Joy - Or Humiliation! Anyone who has just found himself in a rather humiliating scenario will frequently scream at viewers: "Why don't you take a picture, it lasts longer?" Needless to say, considering that it is now incredibly easy to try and do just that, this sarcastic rejoinder is something of a risk at the best of times.
It seems like the only method to prevent the preservation of embarrassing moments these days is actually to not do just about anything humiliating.
Just about everyone has an embarrassing photograph or two around, but we usually are lucky that our moms and dads store them in an album and just bring them out when a prospective life-partner is already very deeply enmeshed in our lives to make a fast getaway.
Nevertheless, along with the innovation of digital cameras an internet-based photo posting, this has turn out to be something of a minefield.
There is not much you can do about shameful photographs making their way on to the Internet, short of confiscating all cameras whenever you are around individuals - and because of the decreasing size of the typical mobile phone this is fairly tough to handle anyway.
So all you can do is acknowledge that you aren't the first person to have it happen to them and will definitely not be the last.
What you should be cautious about is the growing number of sites that are specialized in putting embarrassing photos where the whole world can easily see them.
There are many sires now dedicated to bringing shameful Facebook photos to the larger world.
You don't wish to be seen by strangers and hear them giggling "There is the man whose pants dropped on the Eiffel Tower.
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