What do you use for online photo storage and why?

[piatti]

All my pictures get stuck in my external hard drive because I seldom connect it to my laptop, so I very infrequently view the photos which defeats the purpose of picture taking.

Could anybody give me suggestions as to how to store photos online for viewing them anywhere where there is Internet access?

[thatoneguy82]

Originally Posted by piatti

All my pictures get stuck in my external hard drive because I seldom connect it to my laptop, so I very infrequently view the photos which defeats the purpose of picture taking.

Could anybody give me suggestions as to how to store photos online for viewing them anywhere where there is Internet access?

I upload them to my domain and then use piwigo to view them. It's pretty automatic really. There's an FTP program that works great on the iPhone and updating the photo album requires just one click to update the new photos.

But, then again, for this you'd need your own domain, hosting and piwigo, which is a MySQL program.

[malman89]

A decent site I found while I was studying abroad a few years ago was Shutterfly. It's not the greatest site, but basically if you upload anything, they then give you 25-100 free photo prints (except shipping). It was the best.

Upload photos, get free prints, print off a hundred photos for $8, and then I put them into a collage of sorts for my apartment wall. They also have easy share sites - I just gave friends/family the link and they could see when I uploaded new pics.

[Fed]

I use Google Picasa. It ties in nicely with the rest of Google's product portfolio and is very reliable.

If one upgrades their storage for Google Drive, from what I understand, the extra storage is shared between Picasa and Drive. The only thing stopping me from upgrading is Google's privacy statements. From what I can see, it looks scary because of all the inherent rights it needs to replicate and store data across their servers. But regardless, I'm still not comfortable enough to upgrade yet.

For now, I archive things with Rapidshare. Though, having seen other people's replies, I'm tempted to stop being lazy and incorporate some photo galleries into my website. But, again, I'll have to upgrade my storage.

[chaosbunny]

Nothing. Because my photos are not Apples, Googles or someone elses business.

[OneMike]

Originally Posted by chaosbunny

Nothing. Because my photos are not Apples, Googles or someone elses business.

Same here. I keep a local copy on my computer. I also have several backup mechanisms in place for my pictures and all data.

I do have photostream enabled, but that's not even 1% of my pictures.

[MonkeySee....]

Originally Posted by OneMike

Same here. I keep a local copy on my computer. I also have several backup mechanisms in place for my pictures and all data.

I do have photostream enabled, but that's not even 1% of my pictures.

bye logic!

[Jessica Lares]

Matted, framed, or at least printed out. There is no reason to keep photos on a hard drive where they'll be most likely wiped out eventually due to a failure or self-error. Sure, I have an external drive, but they are not my only means of backup. Shoot, throw away excess, edit, print, delete original, done.

People didn't used to keep their photos online years ago, nor should they be doing that now IMO. All these ideas about pulling out photos to show to people? It never happens, ever. Family photos are better suited in desks, wallets, and photo albums.

[OneMike]

Originally Posted by MonkeySee....

bye logic!

Perfect logic.

You can enable photo stream in iPhoto on your mac and disable automatic upload.

Sharing select photos as wanted to another iOS user, computer, apple tv, etc.. is not the same as pushing off all of your data automatically. So no, I don't rely on photostream to backup. I do occasionally use it to share similar to as done on twitter, facebook, etc..

[MonkeySee....]

Originally Posted by OneMike

Perfect logic.

You can enable photo stream in iPhoto on your mac and disable automatic upload.

Sharing select photos as wanted to another iOS user, computer, apple tv, etc.. is not the same as pushing off all of your data automatically. So no, I don't rely on photostream to backup. I do occasionally use it to share similar to as done on twitter, facebook, etc..

Photostream isn't a back up solution.

I was commenting on your logic agreeing with the guy that who said he doesn't even want Apple to have access to his photos yet you said you use photostream.

Does not compute.

[TheNewDude]

I keep one copy on my HDD and one copy of an external drive.

Always have two copies.
I've had two external HDDs fail on me, so I always keep copies. And for how cheap HDDs are, I'm thinking of getting another external and having 2 External HDDs for backup.

My brother suggested a RAID setup with two drives too to make things easier, but I've still got to look into that and figure out how that works.

[OneMike]

Originally Posted by MonkeySee....

Photostream isn't a back up solution.

I was commenting on your logic agreeing with the guy that who said he doesn't even want Apple to have access to his photos yet you said you use photostream.

Does not compute.

eh I could go on, but really, it's not that serious...

Originally Posted by TheNewDude

I keep one copy on my HDD and one copy of an external drive.

Always have two copies.
I've had two external HDDs fail on me, so I always keep copies. And for how cheap HDDs are, I'm thinking of getting another external and having 2 External HDDs for backup.

My brother suggested a RAID setup with two drives too to make things easier, but I've still got to look into that and figure out how that works.

I was looking for going raid a little while ago, but at the time. With USB 3 being new to Mac, didn't find any solutions that supported that. Definitely something I'm going to look into though.

[peeaanuut]

I have free SmugMug pro for life so a lot of what I have goes on there. Some stuff is for sale as I do some event photography. Other stuff is just to store there.

At home I have several books that I have had printed for certain events or collections. Otherwise they are store on drives and back-ups. I print some as I see fitting but most are electronically displayed. Either on picture frames or something along those lines.

As far as current printing, even the archival inks and papers have been known to fail. A continued multi-location back-up is really the closest to a guaranteed archiving mechanism you can get. For all copies to be affected at one time would have to be a very catastrophic event.

----------

Originally Posted by TheNewDude

I keep one copy on my HDD and one copy of an external drive.

Always have two copies.
I've had two external HDDs fail on me, so I always keep copies. And for how cheap HDDs are, I'm thinking of getting another external and having 2 External HDDs for backup.

My brother suggested a RAID setup with two drives too to make things easier, but I've still got to look into that and figure out how that works.

For true back-up one of those additional back-ups should be off site.

[macquariumguy]

I own a handful of domains, most dating back to the turn of the century and have maintained shared hosting services all that time. Several of the domains have Gallery installs. Most of them now redirect to a blog that has links back to the original sites.

It's a dilemma. I would love to simply, but don't know what I want to turn loose and what I want to keep.

[aziatiklover]

Box.net for me! They gave me 50GB free when i bought my HP touchpad.

[piatti]

Originally Posted by thatoneguy82

I upload them to my domain and then use piwigo to view them. It's pretty automatic really. There's an FTP program that works great on the iPhone and updating the photo album requires just one click to update the new photos.

But, then again, for this you'd need your own domain, hosting and piwigo, which is a MySQL program.

How much does it cost to own your domain?

[peeaanuut]

the domain name isnt really the cost, its the hosting service cost. They can range from a few bucks a month to a few hundred. It all depends on the features and the amount of space you want.

[thatoneguy82]

Originally Posted by piatti

How much does it cost to own your domain?

Some hosting companies give you free domain registration for the first year if you buy hosting, but otherwise it's 9.99 usually. You can purchase/register as many domains as you want, but need to buy hosting for each. Cost of hosting, however, varies. Basic can vary from $7-12/month depending on the hosting service. Two popular ones are GoDaddy or DreamHost. Bear in mind that you have unlimited space to upload to and several website apps to use. You can upload from pretty much anywhere since there's webFTP and the FTP app for the iPhone.

The "basic" of hosting refers to amount of bandwidth, not the space. Hosting services gives you unlimited space now.

[diagnostics247]

I used Dreamhost for several years and was impressed with their service. Especially since I was new to the area of web hosting and design.