We've all been there.  You go to a party or on a trip, make random faces for someone's camera, and wait.  And wait.  "I won't have time to upload it till next weekend" she says, or "I'll do it over Christmas break."  By the time the photo is finally freed from her camera it's a month later and you've forgotten what the faces were for.

At Picurio we refer to this problem as Import Fear.  The thought of uploading photos (camera to computer to Flickr, Facebook, blog, and grandparents) can be an overwhelming task, and it makes us procrastinate on importing our photos for weeks or months.  We dread uploading, sorting, ranking, and tagging like we dread Monday mornings.  But shouldn't this be fun?

Our ability to wait for photos must stem from the Kodak processing days when we dropped off rolls of film at the drugstore and picked them up five days later, but these days we want things fast, now, in real-time.  We want to have that photo waiting for us by the time we get home, or better yet in our pocket just moments after it was taken.  Wi-fi or Eye-fi enabled cameras and camera phones are a step in the right direction, as is Posterous's new PicPosterous app, but the pieces aren't all fitting together just yet.

How should import fear be eliminated?

Back in May we conducted a stream of interviews with current Stanford students about how they share photos.  They all had two things in common.  1) They use Facebook.  2) Their parents had tried unsuccessfully to add them as friends.

No factor bothered them more than allowing their parents to see all their college photos - dorm events, parties, and the like.  In their parents eyes it was a hip way to keep in touch with a child living far from home.  In the students' eyes it was a voyeur's request for too much information.

All the students handled the situation differently.  One accepted the friend request, got scolded for some photos posted by a dorm mate, and promptly de-friended.  Another refused the request, and instead gets photos from his father via MMS in his efforts to stay in touch.  None of them had attempted to navigate the elusive Facebook privacy settings to solve the problem.

Facebook was not designed to be a photo sharing app, nor was it built around permissions controls.  In the beginning, only college students at elite universities were allowed on the site - the air of exclusivity that undoubtedly made it popular in the first place.  They could post anything and everything, knowing it would be seen only by peers.  The site opened up to more universities, then high schools, and now parents and grandparents.  A recent article in the Stanford magazine encouraged parents to use social networking tools as an "opportunity to connect with their children".  I question how many were successful.

We at Picurio hope to solve this problem.  The site is built around photos and photo permissions.  Rooms make it easy to see who can see which photos, and a dead-simple drag-and-drop can be used to move photos between them.  When a friend shares photos from an event in one room, all it takes is a single drag-and-drop to get the mom-friendly photos into the family room and vice versa.  It's easy to share not only photos you took, but photos anyone took of you.  And you can do it in a one-off fashion without hassle.  The photo permissions problem, solved.

When asked if he'd pay $5 a month to see photos of me, my father replied "$5? I'd pay $500!".  Needless to say, my Picurio-enabled father is a happy camper.  And he's sticking to his own friends on Facebook.

--Laura