Decentralize Your Photos

Currently reading “Blockchain 2035” (co-written by Jared Tate, founder of Digibyte [DGB]– which I own). One of the concepts thrown around a lot is “decentralization”. Beyond just this anarchist-hippie libertarian utopist perspective, the general notion of decentralization is good. For example, best to *not* have all your photos stored only on Instagram. What if your account gets deleted, blocked etc? Then you’re fucked. Same goes with trusting everything to Facebook, Twitter, etc.

Your photos want to be free

I’ve always had a passion for open source, ever since I was a scrappy and poor kid. Even now, I prefer things which are open and free — including my photos. I’ve always had a disdain for DRM (locked digital rights management) which makes your life a pain in the ass. I also don’t like Adobes new subscription service — if for some reason you get kicked out of your sign-in ID, and forget your password, you can’t even access your Lightroom catalogue. This is one of the big reasons I’m shifting to just using the default Apple Photos app, and also backing up my photos as JPEG images to Dropbox.

Don’t put your photos all into one bucket

Your photos are valuable. Have you ever had a hard drive crash causing you to lose all your original photos? It is painful– like losing a part of yourself.

To best allay this chance of losing it all, to “diversify” your photos is good. Uploading your photos and sharing it to many different platforms — your own FTP server, on Dropbox, Google Drive, etc. I’ve typically found the best is when you upload your favorite JPEG images to your own website and blog, and openly allow for people to copy, download and replicate it. Like DNA — the human source code is decentralized and likes diversity and variation.

Pay for control over convenience

The general thought is this:

When it comes to things you really really care for, take the more difficult route (which offers you more control).

For example, disdain Instagram_Facebook and build your own self hosted server website blog instead (sign up bluehost.com and install wordpress.org). Best pay for your own domain, hosting, and server costs. This way you know that one day in the future, your photos won’t be locked and held hostage (think about what Photobucket did). Or after some tech companies go defunct (Xanga, blogging service) all your content dies too.