Flickr Privacy Settings

Hi. I have about 24,000 photo's on Flickr, but most are set to allow access from family only. The original intention was that Flickr'd be a good way to let family have access to ALL our digital images.

Now though I'm wondering why they need to be private at all, and while lots would never attract comments etc, I wouldn't mind making them available for that if someone wanted to; it might help my photography.

None of them are in any way offensive, and very very few show anyone in any context that could feasibly be used inappropriately; for example although there are loads of shots of kids on there, only about 10 show them naked; for example in the bath or playing in a river. I'd keep those private.

Basically, instead of doing what I do now which is keep all my shots private, but then making exceptions for certain sets or individual images, I want to reverse the process so the private ones are the exceptions.

What's the general consensus; by keeping perfectly innocent photo's of family etc private, am I being paranoid, or is the reverse true and making them public would be taking too great a risk? I'm not even sure whether there IS any risk, beyond the risk of someone in a photo thinking I need their permission.

Do I need to ask everyone who appears in my shots (or their parents if under 18) for permission, which would be pretty impractical to say the least!

Discounting the term 'risk' here, as only you can assess that, I would be asking other family members how they feel about the photos being made public. If they have 'permitted' in the knowledge that they were for family viewing only, they could be very unhappy at them being made public ... and as for the 'naked kid shots' ... don't go there!

Cheers Gramps.

No the naked kid shots are a non-issue; there's no way I'd ever make those public no-matter-what, even though they are perfectly innocent and all of my own children, so no permissions needed. If they were other people's kids, I doubt I'd even be comfortable keeping the shots at all, regardless of why they were taken.

Many of the photo's were taken before sites like Flickr even existed (and quite a few before digital!), and I've never asked anyone if they mind them being up, or discussed my privacy settings. I have of course invited them as family contacts, so some of them will have worked it out for themselves, but my attitude (right or wrong, which is at least part of what I'm asking), is that they're MY pictures, not theirs, obtained with permission and without any questions being asked about what I intended to do with them, so I don't need to ask to show them to whoever I want to. Legally that's the case, but I'm unsure "morally", hence the question.

I guess really I'm just asking what normal practice is? What do others do with Flickr's privacy settings?