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How to Use Technology to Strengthen Family Ties
018 Preserving Digital Photos on an Online Website
Your niece’s wedding was lovely, and you were able to take some fun pictures of both family and friends that you saw there. If you are like my wife, Jill, when you get back home, you download the pictures to your computer and perhaps crop them or adjust the color, etc. She then generally erases them from her camera, so that she has room for new ones. Sometimes she posts them on the internet and sends a few choice ones to the people who are in the photos. And then what happens to them? These are some of her thoughts:
It is easy to forget about the pictures that you have taken, and you may have many now on your computer. But what happens if your computer fails, and those precious photos are wiped out? This happened to my son who lost several years of pictures of his darling daughters. So what can you do to avoid this?
Besides saving them to an external hard drive, another option would be to upload them to an internet site that is designed to store digital pictures, like the private, password-protected websites at LastingLinks.com. (See how to get your own free or premium private Lasting Links website on the lower left corner of this page.) An internet site works well because you don’t have to invest in any hardware, like an external drive, and your pictures will always be there if you continue as a customer of the service and the service remains viable.
Online Backup for your Digital Photos
#1. Online backup services like carbonite.com offer an online backup that automatically backs up all new files for around $60.00 a year. Others like Mozy.com offer unlimited storage and also allow not just photographs but files of all types. For under $5.00 a month, Mozy will either automatically back up your files, or you can schedule a time for the backup. Your files are encrypted on both these services, so that no one can access your pictures and other documents.
#2. Photo-sharing services like Flickr, Photobucket or Shutterfly allow you to store both photographs and video clips online for others to view. Unlike Lastinglinks.com, however, they are really not meant to store originals of your photos because they typically re-size (that is, downgrade the resolution of) your photos in order to conserve storage space on their servers. In other words, don’t plan on retrieving your original, high-resolution photos from those services unless you pay a premium – it is unlikely you will able to get them back at their original resolution.
The Cost of Online Storage for Digital Photos
If you only have a few hundred photos on your computer that occupy anywhere between 1-2 GB of storage space, you can enjoy any of above backup services for free but if your storage requirements are slightly more, you probably need to go for a paid version.
Here’s a graph from Labnol.org that compares the storage cost of various online backup services where you can safely store your photos, at least as long as they stay in business. Remember that no current storage solution is forever. Keep backups of all your most important memories on more than one type of storage.
Offline storage costs from Labnol.org
Flickr Pro costs around $25 an year and you can store unlimited number of pictures here though the maximum size of individual pictures should not exceed 20 MB Picasa Web Albums on the other hand lets you purchase storage on-demand so you only pay $5 per year for 20 GB of online storage but end-up paying $100 for 400 GB of storage. Like Flickr, images uploaded to Picasa Web Albums can be no larger than 20MB and are restricted to 50 megapixels or less.
Live Skydrive looks like it may be among the better online candidates– it offers 25 GB of free space (50 MB limit for individual files) and that should be enough for most home users. You can upload picture libraries from your desktop to Windows Live SkyDrive using the free Windows Live Photo Gallery client though it’s only available for Windows.
Online backup services like Mozy cost around $60 per year respectively but here you get unlimited storage, your files are automatically backed up (in the background) and there are no restrictions on file-size.
SmugMug, another popular photo-sharing site, offers a service called SmugVault that uses Amazon S3 to backup your photos, videos and all other file-types that you can imagine. They have a relaxed 600 MB per file limit and you pay the normal Amazon S3 rent for files that are not photos.
Amazon S3, where you pay only for what you use, is apparently very reliable (they promise 99.9% uptime) but it turns out to be very expensive if your yearly storage requirement exceeds 10 GB.
Here’s another representation of the same graph – Yearly costs (in $) vs. storage offered (in GB).
Offline storage costs table by Labnol.org
Windows Live SkyDrive offers 25 GB of online storage space for your pictures for free though there’s no option to purchase extra storage. In paid services, Google’s Picasa offers the best value for money if your photo collection can fit in 20 GB else a Flickr Pro account probably makes more sense.
Picasa desktop software makes it easy for you to upload and download photos from Picasa Web Albums. Flickr provides an uploading utility but you need to rely on third-party helps to download the original (full-resolution) albums from Flickr.