flickr pro

Recently I talked with my mom, now she's probably the typical person for a late baby boomer, not so tech savvy and fascinated with the ability to pull up an ebay listing and view an item. I've been doing tech support for a good most of my adult life - I've been working with computers for over 20 years now. So naturally I am considered your geek next door, that guy in the office that someone from work can ask questions to, etc.. but one thing I've grown to hate over the years is family and neighbor tech support. At first I thought it was cool, but now it does nothing more than to annoy me, so anymore I point them to an article I find on google or tell them to call Dell/(respective OEM dealer here). I am THE tech support for my mom. SHe has my old Alienware 51M laptop and uses dial-up on netzero to access the internet (Both of which I pay for.)

Now usually I use my .mac photo galleries for publishing photos to the web, and recently found out my mother has an older IE browser that won't let her view the pictures, which has been bumming her out for months. I have a 10 month old son, so new pictures for my mom is crucial. I pointed her to my flickr account. It was a free account and I posted pics now and then up there to play around. I never took it too seriously... that is until last night.

My mom called ecstatic - she was able to look at my pictures - all 80 or so of them. And new ones she had never seen. So I told her I'd upload a bunch more, she almost started to cry on the phone. It's funny how sometimes it's the little things that really mean the most to my mom, and I often forget that.

So I pulled up the flicker upload tool, drug in almost 300 pics from my iPhoto library and let the thing fire off. This is when I found that my free account wasn't going to cut it. You are limited in the amount you can upload monthly (30 MB I believe) and people can only see the last 200 photos uploaded. So I upgraded to the pro account, for 25 bucks a year you can't seem to beat it! Unlimited upload, and no limit on the number of photos people can see.

So I guess my point to all this rambling is:
1. flickr pro account is worth it
2. .mac isn't always a good solution if you are trying to reach a large audience
3. sometimes it's the little things that make a huge difference to someone
4. never try to make a blog post without caffeine, I tend to ramble