What do you do with your photos?

I print it out on photo paper, violently scratch the eyes out of any people that might be in the picture, and then nail it to the wall of my basement with all the others.

Collect them for 20 years until I have 3TB of poorly sorted files of which I have posted less than 2000.

They sit on a hard drive, on another hard drive, on a usb drive, and I might start burning DVDs too, just for the hell of it.

Since it would be a shame if they sit there without anyone ever seeing them, I post on Pixelfed every now and then.

They get saved on a hard drive and backed up to an off-site server. I can then enjoy them from any device anywhere, and can show people if they're interested. I don't share them or post them publicly. People don't care and I don't need validation from others to take more photos.

Most the time I just upload them to Flickr, 500px, Instagram and YouPic but I also have already printed some shots and gifted them or hung them up on my own walls.

It sits in my Lightroom catalogue and never goes anywhere. Sometimes I’ll post to Instagram or previously Reddit, but for the most part they just sit.

I’m thinking of getting a couple big sheet metal prints of 2-3 of my favorites to hang. I just moved into a new place with a lot of wall space and I’d like to put some up.

I make photo albums of a selection of all the photos I take and then show it to anyone who wants to see it. During holidays I also take video, and then combine those clips with photos into a home video. I have printed some photos to hang on the wall, so my home is filled with my own photos. I have some as desktop wallpaper. Lately, I make theme photo albums. I have one with all the different birds I have photographed and one with all my prettiest photos.

Desktop wallpapers, instagram, photo books sometimes.

If I like it enough (not often), I’ll share it on Glass. If I really like it (less often), I’ll print it out to hang on the wall. Most of the time they just get uploaded to iCloud so I can view them on my phone and iPad. I’ve printed a photobook once a long time ago; I’m working on another.

I sometimes upload photos to my Pixelfed account. I also participate in the 52frames.com weekly challenge, so I frequently post there as well.

But recently I also started posting to my own dedicated photo site. It's ... more meaningful to me, and I can share the posts with some community (52frames mentioned above has an active Discord server, also "Focal Point with C. London" as well).

A note on my own site: I'm a techie and tend to obsess about loading times and static site generators and all that - so I end up with a typical software developer's blog - blogging about how to setup the blog itself. So for this thing I said, "I don't care about performance, SEO, anything. I'll just post photos".

So if you plan to do something like that, I suggest just going for it. Just pick a platform and start posting. After a time, you'll figure out what you want to do, in which direction to move, so can adjust later. But just getting started should be easy, and it motivates you a lot.

Everything goes on a hard drive, then backed up. The best ones get put into folders on my NextCloud where my family can see them.

If I want to make one public, such as a particularly good cat picture, I may post it on Pixelfed.

I have a shared Apple photos album with my dad and occasionally share with a small handful of friends on discord or on a Pixelfed with zero followers for the sake of having them somewhere that isn't my apple photos album.

I've had a very small handful printed as Shutterfly's metal photo tiles, and I thought they did a pretty good job (though the mounting was not sufficient for a textured wall paint).