I recently went on holidays with the family. In the two and a bit weeks we were away I shot about 2500 photos and a small amount of video. I'll freely admit that I am to photography what Britney Spears is to sanity but there really were some great shots in there. The problem is, of course, how to share them.

There are lots of photo-sharing services out there. I'd suggest that the most popular is Flickr.
However, Apple has one through MobileMe, Microsoft Live is another and there are lots of others. So the problem isn't one of platform but of too many choices.

At the end of each day, I'd pull the SD card out of my Nikon D80 and download the photos into iPhoto on my 13-inch MacBook Pro. Each day, I tried to pick the best five or ten images from the 200 or so that I shot to share with the folks back home. As well being a way to gloat about the fun we were having it was far easier than writing a bunch of postcards.

So - how did I share my photos? I ended up using two systems. The first was Facebook. I was thinking of using Flickr but I have lots of family and friends who I keep with via Facebook so that seemed the easiest way to hit the most people in one go.

For those not on Facebook - it was a toss up between MobileMe and Flickr. At the end the decision was arbitrary. I could really see any benefit between the two platforms for my purpose. Getting photos to both was easy as iPhoto makes that a one-button job.

In all the discussion about how different social media platforms and tools can influence the way we do business and fill our lives with sometimes pointless dribble it's easy to forget that their real raison d'etre
is to make it easy to stay in contact with those that matter to us.

So - how do you share photos and movies? Facebook seems to have become my Plan A although MobileMe, Flickr and TwitPic all get used from time to time. I suspect that the main (only?) reason I use MobileMe is that I've paid for the service and feel compelled to try and extract as much value from it as possible.

One more thing... a huge thankyou to Drew Turney who sat in for me while I was on holidays. I'm sure you all appreciate his effort in Socialising with you and sharing his insights.