I cancelled my Flickr Pro account yesterday, and following a nudge from David Wiley, moved my digital photographs to Trovebox, an open source photo management tool.

I’ve been a member of Flickr since June 2005. I started the account to host and display photos of Anthony’s artwork which I’d often embed in the blog I kept at the time about his cancer and dying.

“The blog I kept at the time…”

Flickr is one of the Web services I’ve used the longest — the last remaining one in my toolbox, I’m almost certain, of the tools I used in my first days of blogging. Bloglines. Delicious. Blogger. Technorati. Haloscan. These early Web 2.0 sites have all been acquired and/or shuttered and/or I’ve moved on. “The Web We Lost,” if you will.

It’s not always been easy to switch from one tool to another after you’ve invested a lot of time and energy and gigabytes into it. It’s not easy technologically, and it’s not easy emotionally, particularly when it comes to photography.

Photographs have a special significance, one that’s (often) greater than the blog posts, the RSS feeds, the comments, the bookmarks contained in those other Web 2.0 services. And I think that’s partly why I’ve stayed with Flickr for so long. It’s why I paid for the service too, as under the old pricing plan, you’d lose access to your photos after a certain number of uploads unless you paid the annual fee.

I don’t leave Flickr out of fury, although I am frustrated by the recent updates to its UI and fee structure. These changes have made me more open to the possibilities of moving my photos elsewhere, particularly knowing that the new Flickr Pro accounts just aren’t that appealing. That leaves a $25 annual fee on the table, and as a premium account at Trovebox is $29.99 a year — and includes an import tool that quickly and easily pulls all my Flickr, Facebook, and Instagram photos (plus their metadata) — I was willing to switch.

Even more appealing to me, Trovebox lets me choose where I store my photos — on Dropbox, Box, or Amazon S3, for example, or on Trovebox itself.

And as such, it feels like another step towards “reclaiming my domain,” a concerted effort — inspired and assisted by folks like Jim Groom, D’Arcy Norman, Boone Gorges, Alan Levine, Martin Hawksey, Jon Udell, Kin Lane and others — to have more control over my digital identity and data.

Of course, as Stephen Downes notes in a recent blog post about “what’s ours,” this control is only partial. He writes that “I have no illusion that hosting my own domain and server and all the rest of it will free from such fecklessness” as we’ve recently seen with Yahoo and Flickr. “It simply moves it back a level.” Indeed, while I’ll no longer rely on the latter to store my photos, I do still rely on Amazon Web Services to do just that, along with plenty of third party services (for DNS, for wireless access, and so on) with far more lock-in than Flickr ever demanded.

But I’m still committed to “owning my own domain,” despite the marketing and Terms of Service of the tech and telecom industries that want me to do otherwise. There is no silver bullet tools that enables me to do this; rather it’s a matter of my choosing to use (or trying to use) only services that provide data portability. (Although that alone is insufficient. Google, for example, has a “data liberation” project, but I’ll be damned if I rely on any more Google products.) It’s a matter too of learning how to architect my digital presence – for discoverability, longevity, security, and integrity.

Image credits: The Noun Project