To share or not to share?

I have been a member of Flickr since 2006 and of Instagram for 8 years and I’m asking myself now, what is it I want from these platforms? 

I stopped using Flickr in 2018 as I got exhausted and fed up with the constant adding to groups, people liking my images and then asking me to like theirs. It all became…well…boring. Since the new year I have started to post on Flickr again but…I’m getting bored.

Instagram is a little less hassle, but you still have to add hashtags, try to make sure that images are square or 5:4 ratio and I have to upload pictures from the desktop as all my images come from my cameras, not the phone.

I’m not fooling myself, no one is going to look at either of these platforms, see my pictures and think that I am the next best thing since Adams, White or Frank.

So why do I do it?

Whilst discussing this dilemma with a friend a light finally came on and I decided that was it! No more Instagram and no more Flickr. Instead, I will concentrate on re-designing and repopulating my website marshall.net which desperately needs a make-over and which I have been putting off for months and adding images to my Marshall Projects site which has been the recipient of my previous three 365 projects.

I print all my output and I am still catching up with previous years images that were completed before I obtained my printer. So I have more than enough to do and cannot really spare the time curating the images for various social media.

I actually do feel so much better for having made the decision to move away from Instagram and Flickr and also strangely feel that I have now some control over my photography rather than feeling compelled to post on them.