The same flickr which capriciously deletes the photos of paying customers? The same flickr which has catastrophic accidents? The same flickr who bans paying customers for commenting on political issues? The same flickr which one day decided that paintings and drawings weren't suitable for its site?

Yeah. I'm not ok with that. If you're "liberating" your Instagram photos to Flickr, you're merely trading one jail cell for another.

As I've mentioned before, we're moving to an era where people control their own content. They don't need to cede it to some 3rd party and hope that the terms and conditions don't change from under their feet.

So, what's the solution? People are saying "what did we do before Instagram? Oh yes, Flickr!" What they should be doing is saying "What did we do before Flickr? Oh yes, self hosting."

That's where OpenPhoto.me comes in. The premise is simple. You store your photos on your own storage system. That could be your DropBox account (500 MB free), your Box.com account (5GB free), or Amazon S3 (5GB free), or CX.com, or DreamHost's DreamObjects - or, finally, on your own server.

They're your photos - so you get control of them. You can easily back them up, move to a different hosting provider, or delete them forever.

You get a nice front end for your photos - with commenting, tagging, albums, privacy settings, mobile viewing and uploads etc.

You can change the look and feel of the theme to suit your preferences.

With a single click you can import your images, tags, comments, and metadata from Instagram, Flickr and Facebook. No doubt more services will be arriving soon - or you can manually upload your photos.

As I've mentioned, if you really don't trust any of the above storage providers, you can use the Open Source OpenPhoto to run everything on your own server.

Why on Earth would you want your photos to be held hostage by some nebulous third party? Even if you have a billing relationship with them, it won't stop them changing their terms and conditions, or "mistakenly" deleting your work.

Want to liberate your photos from the evil Instagram? Tired of Facebook's stranglehold on your images? Remembering why you left Flickr in the first place?

Here's the button you need to press.

Based on the evidence I've accumulated, mobile advertising is subject to a lot of hype and not a lot of professionalism.

Take this example as seen on my BlackBerry 9000.

Flickr iPhone Advert

First off the bat, it gets my phone wrong. It should be using the User Agent to determine which advert to serve.

Well, let's be a good consumer and click on it any way...

What the deuce?!

It has taken me to the Desktop version of the iTunes installation page - despite knowing I'm on a mobile!

What Should Have Happened?

• My phone requests the advert.
• Advertising agency serves up a device specific ad.
• I click on the ad.
• The ad server sees my User Agent
• For iPhone, it should automatically redirect me to the App Store
• For BlackBerry / Android / S60  etc, it should automatically redirect me to the native app store
• For everything else, it should automatically redirect me to http://m.flickr.com/

How Can It Go So Wrong?!

I'm making the assumption that this is an advert by flickr.  It may well be an advert by a third-party who have a (chargeable) app for iPhone.

Even if it is the latter - why are they advertising on BlackBerry?  Or, rather, why is their advertising agency wasting their marketing budget by showing an advert on a device which can't support the content?

Make Sure Your Advert Works

It's not rocket science.  If people can't get to your product, they won't spend money with you.  They'll also get a negative impression of your brand.