How do you store your photos online?

quarryman

With flickr upgrading their storage quota, I was wondering what is the best "cloud" service suited to storing my collection of photos.

Ideally I want:

1. Something that will sync what I have in a folder on my PC to the cloud and update whenever files change or I add new files
2. Storage for at least 50GB.
3. Ability to view them easily.

What are the best options?

Borderfox

Something like dropbox sounds about right, I hold all my pictures on Zenfolio and day to day stuff goes to Drobo and dropbox

RainyDay

quarryman wrote: »

With flickr upgrading their storage quota, I was wondering what is the best "cloud" service suited to storing my collection of photos.

Ideally I want:

1. Something that will sync what I have in a folder on my PC to the cloud and update whenever files change or I add new files

I'm thinking about taking a leap of faith, and going cloud only - getting rid of the photos after they upload.

DaireQuinlan

RainyDay wrote: »

I'm thinking about taking a leap of faith, and going cloud only - getting rid of the photos after they upload.

That's quite the leap of faith. Unless you're signing some serious SLAs and ensure redundancy you could lose everything with one outage. I'm sure there are publically available redundant and fault tolerant storage services, but I'll bet you'll pay through the nose for them.

RainyDay

DaireQuinlan wrote: »

That's quite the leap of faith. Unless you're signing some serious SLAs and ensure redundancy you could lose everything with one outage. I'm sure there are publically available redundant and fault tolerant storage services, but I'll bet you'll pay through the nose for them.

I probably should have mentioned that I'm an amatuer, not a pro, but still, family photos etc are very precious to me.

But really, is there any significant risk that a service like Flickr would every permanently lose data?

Corkbah

RainyDay wrote: »

I probably should have mentioned that I'm an amatuer, not a pro, but still, family photos etc are very precious to me.

But really, is there any significant risk that a service like Flickr would every permanently lose data?

so why store them only in the cloud ? ... store them in a couple of places - including an external hard drive and if possible an actual printed photo album (physical prints)

if they are precious print them and keep them stored somewhere.

DaireQuinlan

RainyDay wrote: »

I probably should have mentioned that I'm an amatuer, not a pro, but still, family photos etc are very precious to me.

But really, is there any significant risk that a service like Flickr would every permanently lose data?

It's a small risk, but still a risk. They have, in the past, accidentally deleted entire accounts of photos. Run afoul of their T&Cs and they reserve the right to remove your account as well. In addition there are a growing list of apps and shared services that people use to access/view/upload/share with their flickr accounts, these can also go bad, or be misused, and result in loss of data. In short, don't put all your eggs in one basket. 1tb drives are relatively cheap nowadays. Buy a couple and backup your shots on both. Keep one accessible, and one somewhere else, and also backup to flickr. Every physically separate backup you have reduces the chances of losing all your data.

gnote2

Facebook.. and u can make them private. I use it to store my picture, apart from dropbox as a backup.

melekalikimaka

gnote2 wrote: »

Facebook.. and u can make them private. I use it to store my picture, apart from dropbox as a backup.

burn it...before it breeds...

RainyDay

DaireQuinlan wrote: »

It's a small risk, but still a risk. They have, in the past, accidentally deleted entire accounts of photos. Run afoul of their T&Cs and they reserve the right to remove your account as well. In addition there are a growing list of apps and shared services that people use to access/view/upload/share with their flickr accounts, these can also go bad, or be misused, and result in loss of data.

That's true, I hadn't really thought about the risk of Flickr choosing to delete for whatever strange reason. I'll have to think again.

Corkbah wrote: »

so why store them only in the cloud ? .

To avoid the work/effort involved in synching multiple sets every time I take a new set of photos. Unless you have some nice tricks or tools for handling this.

quarryman

I really just want something that is the minimum effort for me.

I want to just copy the photos to a folder on my PC and then let a tool sync them to the cloud. As far as I can tell neither flickr or google drive don't do this.

Google drive creates a seperate folder where you have to drag stuff in each time.

Flickr doesn't seem to have a suitable batch upload program.

Also Dropbox costs €7.86, Google Drive costs €4.68. And I'd prefer to have my files on Google...

ditpaintball

While technically not on cloud storage, I use a LaCie 6TB NAS system. It's a network harddrive with 2 x 3TB hard drives in RAID-1 mode.

As it's a network drive, you can set it up for external access, from anywhere. So assuming your internet connection never fails at home, you can access it from anywhere, always.


*Quick reminder to Back-up ..... Back-up ....... BACK-UP* Yes... thats 3 back-ups of anything important you have.

Bodhran

Your photos are precious today, priceless tomorrow so don't even think of storing them exclusively on any external website. Put them on Flickr, Facebook etc., by all means if that's what floats your boat. But make sure you have backups on your PC/Laptop; on an external hard-drive and, if at all possible, also keep copies off-site particularly for those irreplaceable family photos.

jonnybangbang

You can manage your flicker and facebook account using Lightroom if you have it. Upload direct from lightroom. I don't know about it syncing when every you change a file/photo .

ditpaintball

One of the main things to remember with facebook is that it strips all EXIF data from images uploaded. So if you ever plan to download them again to use as "masters".... you will have to manually replace the EXIF info.

Paddysnapper

My advice to you is to buy a large capacity external hard drive and store them on that.... A friend of mine in the US (Professional photographer) was using a cloud storage facility....Just before Christmas it just shut down, no warning! everything gone! I do not, or ever will use such a facility, you have no control over it!....If you are the belt and braces type buy 2 ex.hdd's.

Corkbah

Paddysnapper wrote: »

My advice to you is to buy a large capacity external hard drive and store them on that.... A friend of mine in the US (Professional photographer) was using a cloud storage facility....Just before Christmas it just shut down, no warning! everything gone! I do not, or ever will use such a facility, you have no control over it!....If you are the belt and braces type buy 2 ex.hdd's.

a best approach would be NAS system (create your own cloud) - think it was mentioned earlier.

and save to external hard drives.

its expensive but its relative to how much you value your photos.

PyeContinental

Consider also Skydrive (Microsoft's cloud service). It works like Dropbox and Google drive in that the Skydrive app creates a logical folder (or "library") like the documents folder, similar to the way the Dropbox and Google folders appear. Put photos or files into subfolders in the Skydrive folder and it synchronises the contents. You can also upload via a web interface. The first 7GB are free, but you pay for more storage.

I like it because you can choose to make folders public or private or share any individual folder to people as read-only (or full access if you wanted) via a unique URL. Each subfolder also becomes a gallery, and clicking on any photo thumbnail opens a slideshow of the contents. Each photo is uploaded as it is, with no compression of the original. It also keeps all EXIF data. You can also download the original photo or photos from anywhere.

As others have said, don't put all your eggs in one basket!