If Picasa or Flickr ever went away, I would be sad to lose my photos on those platforms. But I have back-ups. What would really make me distraught though, is that the metadata - the data about those photos, would also be gone too. At conferences I have repeatedly asked the founders of photo sites what they are doing to preserve this metadata. I haven't got clear answers.

In fact, I spend most of my time making titles and adding descriptions on those kind of sites. I am sure some would definitely be traumatised if they ever lost that metadata. We just have to trust these photo sites to keep it for us.

At LeWeb a few months back I had a long chat with Gilles Samoun, CEO of Fotonauts. They are looking into ways of automating the tagging procedure - as well as building collections that access relevant information, either from Google Maps or Wikipedia. It has the potential to be the companion to Wikipedia, one focussing on text, the other on photos. Backed by people who were once at the top of Apple and Next, Fotonauts is now in beta.