I really loved Flickr, though.

Flickr was the online community for people who loved pictures, and it stood in for the photo lab community that I loved in college. Flickr was down to earth. There were amazing photographs there, if you knew how to look, and there were simple snapshots and everything in between.

There were other sites I knew about, such as 1x.com and 500px.com. Perhaps if I had come across them first I might have liked them more, but by the time I was heavily invested in Flickr, those sites felt pretentious and exclusive (in the sense that they kept out people they considered unworthy).

When someone introduced me to Instagram, though, I got hooked.

Instagram felt even more down to earth than Flickr, but in an entirely different way.

For me, if Flickr was where I shared my “oil paintings”, Instagram was where I shared my “pencil doodles”.

I seldom spent more than a few seconds to a minute on a post, and I posted immediately. I loved the immediacy and transience. I wasn’t interested in building followers or any of the aspects that became such a part of the platform eventually. I just loved having a photographic sketchpad.

After I had been at it for 6 years, I realized that my collective posts provided a journal of my life in ways my Flickr feed did not. Then it occurred to me that looking through my collective posts was quite difficult through the app, and the idea for this book was born.