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About Drazen Tomic

Drazen Tomic is owner of Perspectives Software Solutions. The company created JustResizeIt!, one of the solutions presented here.

You can compare the web to traffic.

You use the streets as a driver, a public transport user and as a pedestrian. It's a necessity, a joy, an achievement in both comfort and liberty. Even if people get injured or even if they die in traffic, you are still using the streets. And you are not thinking of stopping to use them. You learned to be careful.

You should do the same when sharing pictures online. Pictures can hurt. Posting pictures of you on the web can injure you. That doesn't mean you should stop posting anything, but you have to learn to be careful.

It seems we are not completely aware of what we are doing online. We tend to do things we wouldn't do in “real” life. Nobody walks on the street carrying his photo album and showing it around to strangers.
Online sharing became extremely easy with applications and services lowering the effort toward zero. But zero effort is often paid for later. In case of picture sharing, it could be much later. An error of judgment while driving or walking on the streets has pretty immediate consequences. On the web, consequences can take years, if not decades to strike. The web doesn’t forget!

Let's not lose ourselves in espionage matters: Prism, NSA, CIA and others have certainly been among top news recently, but we should look at more concrete threats. One of the big Internet players blocked face recognition in search algorithms, but the technology already exists. How long will it take until somebody makes it available to the public? Once face recognition in search engines is publicly available, all your posted pictures will build a traceable profile of your life. Just imagine the following search request “Find all pictures somehow showing me in the last 30 years”. Now check your feelings.
Also, ask yourself to whom are you sending your pictures. Is it an organization? a state company? or a private company where the aim is to make money? Sometimes I can't get rid of the feeling being fattened up.

So what can you do? You should use private picture sharing whenever possible. That means you make the pictures available only to a private circle of viewers. You can send them directly to individual persons or you can publish them online, protected by username and password.

There is no guarantee that the pictures sent to somebody or laying password protected in an online gallery won't reappear in an awkward moment. You can't avoid public disclosure of your personal identity. Your friends take pictures of you. You are on thousand pictures taken by strangers you even never saw. You are on those pictures and you don't have any control. There is no zero road kill despite all the efforts. But you must invest the effort to avoid dangerous situations.

Until shortly, private picture sharing was synonym for additional work. Sending pictures per email signified composing a new email, adding addresses, adding photos and sending the email. The online gallery solutions called for founded knowledge in web technology. Fortunately, there are solutions today simplifying the effort to a few clicks and are available to everyone.

We are showing some of those solutions here, an automatic resizer and mail sender, a few simple online galleries and an extensive database gallery.

Drazen Tomic