Did you love pictures postings like this one of Pine Cobble, from our very own Diana Davis ‘07?

Or this one of a little slice of semesterly life?

For many months, Diana’s taken and shared with us pictures both of the beautiful and the memorable mundane, snapshots not plashy enough for the alumni review or calendar but which capture real Williams in an invaluable way. And she made a game out of it for us.

Would you like to show your thanks for the years of weekly Friday photo ID posts we’ve all enjoyed?

Recently I asked Diana why she hadn’t added any photos to her flickr account in ages. She told me she had reached her limit: on flickr, a site for storing, sorting, and sharing maximum-quality digital photos, you can have a free account with a usage limit, like hers. If you do, you can use nearly all the site’s features, but only for 200 photos. Now, well all know Diana has many, many more than 200 photos.

My chat with Diana and wish to see more of her work gave me what I think is the perfect idea for how we can thank her. A yearly “pro” account on flickr is $25, and I think we should buy her a year to let her sort and share her work. She has “many gigabytes” of pictures that she wants to share but no way to store the high quality files, nor tag them so people in the pictures could easily see all the pictures of them or their friends. Flickr will let her do this, in fact it is probably the leading service for this purpose, and she already has work there.

If you are interested in chipping in any amount of money to get Diana the gift of a flickr account from all of us, please read the rest of this post. She, by the way, has no idea (until she sees this message) that we’re doing this). Let’s get a lot of us together on this and really show her our appreciation.

For lack of a better way to do this, I will personally collect your donations, honor-bound to accurately tally and use the total towards appropriate gifts for Diana. The first $25 will go towards the year account, and after that I’ll talk with Diana and see whether she’d like a longer term of service, or something like a memory card to facilitate her work.

If you would like to contribute, please email me (my name links to my contact info) to tell me so and how you would like to be acknowledged, and send a check in any amount to

Diana c/o Jonathan Landsman
225-01 B 69th Avenue
Oakland Gardens, NY, 11364

I can probably also take payments through Paypal, if you prefer, but I’ve never tried this before.

I’ll collect at this address for two weeks from this posting date. On July 25th I return home from traveling and will see what’s arrived, tally it, and update here.

I am glad this will happen because not only do I feel it’s a very fitting way to thank Diana, but it’s also a lot like how I got into flickr, and thus more into taking pictures. Sporadically, I write an email update to many of my friends (in lieu of a blog) and include in it pictures of my work, which is very photogenic, as I am a gardener. A professor who liked the photos encouraged me to use flickr, and paid for my first year on the site. The bait worked; I’m hooked now, and very grateful to him. It’s why I know this will help Diana a lot in her purposes, as well.