Experiences: Living them, collecting them, or sharing them

When travelling, at gatherings, special events, or celebrations, do you spend a lot of time taking pictures, maybe with a digital camera? Maybe more time than you spend actually taking part in the activities? Do you get home and download those pictures to your computer right away, maybe flip through them (and there might be hundreds) maybe post a few on flickr or another photosharing site, maybe email a few to friends or family but then Never Look At Them Again?

There are different methods for organizing digital photos. Online there are photo communities like Flickr, software like Gallery, Google's got Picasa and Web Albums, and there are others. For organizing at home, Canon and Kodak have software, Google again, Windows, Linux... all have ways to organize and manage pictures. The question is, do these applications actually encourage people to look through where they've been or are they only useful for cataloguing? Is all this cataloguing turning picture taking into another chore?

Are we commodifying our experiences, in that we go somewhere, do/see something with the goal being just to take a picture? Do we ever revisit these photos and memories? If so, why, when, and how?

I have plenty of pictures from before I got a digital camera. I have even more since I went digital. Why is it that my kids see the pre-digital pictures much more often than the onces since? Why are my pictures on Flickr more likely to be viewed by strangers than my own family? What are some effective ways to share pictures with the people in our families, maybe even those living (gasp) without the Internet???