Most digital photographers probably use some form of online photo album. After all, your photos do no good to anybody if nobody but you sees them. Among the top contenders in this space are Flickr, Picasa and Photobucket. Personally, I am a big fan of Flickr. But, does that mean I should keep everything on Flickr and Flickr only?
I was recently at BlogOrlando in (you guessed it) Orlando, and heard an interesting piece of advice:
Use multiple photo services for the purpose of online backup.
Like most people who take digital photos, I have them all archived locally on my computer. This is my lead repository for my photos and I probably have at least 4,000 photos archived locally. For all of my public photos, I use my Flickr account.
If something happened to Flickr, my entire public gallery would be gone. And some were left thinking about this with some of the recent developments over at Yahoo. The prospect, although not very likely, of Flickr someday going away crossed people’s minds.
So, why not ALSO post your photos over to Picasa? The idea here is redundancy. While storing your photos in the cloud is a cool concept, data loss is still a possibility. The likelihood of one of these services losing your data due to a drive crash is extremely unlikely, however all of these companies are subject to the rules of economics. If they can’t turn a profit, they can disappear. And with that, potentially your photos.
Picasa is free up to 1 gigabyte of storage, after which you will pay for upgrades. $20.00 per year will upgrade you to 10 GB of storage. This isn’t as good a deal as Flickr, where you can get unlimited storage and uploads for $24.95 yearly. But, it does tap you into two different networks.
Other thing to keep in mind is that online backup services may charge you graduated fees depending on your required capacity. You can store data and documents all day and space requirements don’t usually increase dramatically. But, archiving your photos can take up quite a bit of space. So, you can also use these photo services to back up your photos, while using these other services for your data. If you don’t want people looking at your photos, you can choose to make them all private.
Worth consideration. Do you have some thoughts?
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I not only use picassa, my local hard drive, but I also put them on cd and a number of 8gb storage discs that I keep in a wallet stored in a fireproof container.
Okay that may sound like tons of redundancy, but if picassa was to become extinct, my hard drive to crash and the cd to become unreadable….I’d still have them on the sd discs. And since we all have photos we don’t want to lose, because there would go our only pictures of little ones growing up, old ones before they left us and so forth…I feel comfortable that I will some how hold on to the important things in life….paranoia runs rampant…LOL!!!