There’ve been several suggestions made for how to handle my flickr issue. However, Flickr itself introduced a new feature today that solves them all for me. You can now issue “guest passes” to friends and family without a flickr account. This “guest pass” gives you the option of allowing them to see private photos. So, if I want my mom to see my wedding dress photos, I can just click on the set that they’re in and at the top is gives me a share option. This keeps any photos that I want private from the rest of the world, other than those folks that I want to share them with. [It creates a different url than the standard one for the set. Anyone with this url can see the photos, so it’s not something I’d necessarily post here for example.]

This would be great for photos I wanted to catalog using flickr but didn’t want to put out there for the world, like photos that include a friend’s child with a sweater I knit for him. Then I could email my mom and friend and say here, you can see the photos at this link, but the rest of the world can’t.

Hooray for guest passes!