For many hillwalkers a camera is an essential piece of kit. It certainly is for me and I've got shoeboxes and shoeboxes of photos taken when I was doing my round of the Munros. Unfortunately this was before I owned a digital camera and these photos are now unseen and languishing in the attic. I suspect I will struggle to guess where the photos were taken should I ever get round to trying to organise them. Even since I got a digital camera I've been pretty lax in uploading them to online photo albums.
That's going to change now that I've discovered Flickr the photo sharing web site. I'm sure many readers will already know about it but it allows you to upload yor photos, tag them with key words and share them publically or privately. There's also all sorts of advanced features including geo mapping of photographs which allows you to place your photos on a map at the location they were taken. The implications for hillwalking is obvious - looking for photos of a particular area? Simply go to the mapping part of Flickr and see what's been posted there.
There are common interest groups that you can join and there are already several of interest to hillwalkers in Scotland. Its a rich source of material and great fun to browse - and I'm thinking of ways I can use it to enhance this blog. In the first instance I've added a rather nifty Flickr badge to my sidebar - you may have to scroll down a bit. It's an ever changing montage of photos from Flickr that belong to the Scottish Mountains Group. Click through to that page and you can see an excellent slideshow of contributions. If the photos of an individual contributor catch your eye, you can click through to see their albums.
