Photographs and images, there are millions of them. Everyone seems to have at least one digital camera, and even more have picture taking abilities courtesy of mobile phones.

I don't know if you remember how it was a few years ago, we had rolls of film and we were careful about the pictures we took because it was expensive to get them developed, and if we wanted reprints, they were even more expensive. We would have to mark down the negative number and hope there wasn't two numbers associated with the same picture. And going back even further we had glass plates and special visits to "the photographer". Of course if we want to go even further back we would have to consider portrait paintings as the only way to capture a person's image for posterity. But today, we can take as many images as our memory cards will hold, then we could delete the rubbish and download the rest.

I read an interesting statistic the other day - it stated there are over 2 billion images on flickr - http://www.flickr.com - 2 billion !!! and that's just flickr. Add sites such as facebook (http://www.facebook.com) and MySpace (http://www.myspace.com) and you could add another several billion to that tally. But we shouldn't forget the personal websites out there. With storage space coming down in price, it's relatively cheap to store thousands and tens of thousands of images on your computer, or to the cloud.

One of the interesting thing about photographs and I am not brilliant at doing this either, and that is - assigning titles and other metadata to the image. Where and when it was taken, who is in the picture etc etc. This information can be vital if you want to track what people were doing in years to come. 

But personal collections and social sites aren't the only places where images are collected. There are huge collections of images held within the museums, art galleries and libraries across the world. Work is underway to digitise these images and make them available. One of the biggest I know of is Picture Australia - which collects the images from 47 collecting institutions across Australia - http://www.pictureaustralia.org.

As you can imagine these treasure troves can make our histories come alive. How good would it be to be able to trace an ancestors details and then be able to attach an image to the file, so you get to "meet" your relatives for the first time? Personally I think it would be amazing, but that's just me. So don't be lazy - add the metadata to your pics and help those who will follow.