> There's something to be said for having an album of photos that you pull out a couple of times a year to show a select group of others. It makes the experience much more valuable than blasting out content for everyone to see.

While I wholeheartedly agree with the sentiment, and mostly agree with the idea, a part of me sees that only as a change in scale. As someone that doesn't really partake in social media sharing (I use FB for event notification) or take many pictures, I see parallels between sharing the album and posting online. I've had plenty of embarrassing childhood photos shown. Generally the only difference is time from the event.

I mean, it's not like a couple hundred years ago we even had the option to do this (other than the obscenely rich getting portraits painted).

I note all this because I find often when it appears it's just scale that makes a difference, that's just hiding the real things that are causing concern (or perhaps we should also be concerned to some degree about the small scale as well). So in this case, is sharing an album really all that much better? If so, is it because of temporal distance to the events, reduced group size per sharing instance (the overall size might be the same, over time), or sharing with people that aren't in some tighter group (or some combination thereof)?