Thursday, May 25, 2006

The "Baby Photo" Scourge

In today's Wall Street Journal's Personal Journal section, there is a page one article on "The Baby-Photo Backlash." Apparently, proud parents are sending pics of their kids to their friends and family, and some people are okay with it, and others are annoyed by it. Also, parents can set up websites and blogs with photos of their kids, and send links to them. There are, apparently, "etiquette experts" that have something to say about this, like "show restraint," except, of course, when sending pics to the grandparents. Some parents have sent pics to wrong addresses and didn't know it.

That's the article. I don't want to be a critic, but that was about 24 column-inches on a really vacuous subject -- who cares? The one thing that I, being very sensitive to misuse of the web and the diabolical types who troll web sites, care about is that if you have a web site that anyone can access with pictures of your kids, please be aware that anyone can access it, and copy those pictures or your darlings for whatever nepharious reason. Of course, the article didn't mention that, and yet that is the potential tragedy. That is one reason -- the only reason -- I have never posted pictures of my beautiful child on an open web site.

By the way, one of the pieces of advice the article mentioned was to "make sure they are good quality photos." "Good quality" could mean "high resolution" which means "really big," like five or more megabytes per picture. It is not a good idea to send high resolution pics to people via email -- rather, it is better to scale them down by compressing them or resizing them so that they are about two-three hundred kilobytes each -- still big, but not earth-shattering. Of course, "good quality" could mean "nicely framed, in focus, good looking" photographs, and I agree with that wholeheartedly!

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