Lifted from comments: A flickr trend that worries me

Someone wrote about my most recent photo of Yamaraashi-chan:

I hadn't realized how grown-up Yamaraashi-chan was getting till that photo. It's a great picture of her as a young woman, where previously I've seen great pictures of her as a child.

I'm not picking on the writer, really; I happen to agree with the sentiment, even while I'm cautious endorsing it. Yamaraashi-chan is still just a kid who spends her days vacillating between playing with dolls and watching The Most Extreme Animals, and tweening out, lying in her bed looking up at the ceiling, brooding. "I'm not brooding!" she insists. "I'm thinking."

But while the layout is still set as it is, go take a look at my flickr account. You might notice a pattern. I've noticed it before myself, but this time it's particularly icky. Many of the photos there aren't on my blog. I took 450 photographs this trip, selected them down to maybe ten per day, then picked four or five to send to flickr, and finally choose two or three for each blog entry.

Some of the flickr'd pictures have gotten nine, ten, maybe 16 views. Yamaraashi-chan's picture had, as of this morning, been downloaded 65 times. And the paranoid part of me wants to know if between my fatherly pride and wise caution, pride isn't making exercising caution impossible.

I'm tempted to stop talking about the girls entirely, because this trend just icks me. I don't want to think about why that picture is five times more popular than the average photo on my flickr account. But I probably have to.

Something of a compromise.

As it turns out, there is a setting in Flickr that allows you to keep photos out of the sight of public catalogers and browsers, while still allowing you to use the link to the photos. If you set the privacy to "Family," you can still access the photo with a URL for use in blogs, but it will not show up in other individual's tag collections or catalogs.

Unfortunately, it does change the URL so I'm having to go back and fix up some older posts, and some images might be marked "unavailable" for a while until I hunt down the blog entries in which they were used.

I'm more than a little annoyed by the necessity of it all. Bleah!