Online Photo Storage

[mrohde]

I am always worred about hard drive crashes for may offline storage and even with backups getting them out of the house is alway troublesome.

I am wondering if anybody knows if Picassa or a similar service will leave the origionals in tact or if it will downgrade them. I am thinking I would better off having a reputable online compay handle the storage in private galleries so I can share what I want easily and pull down what I want to edit in high res when I need it.

An alternitve would be something like Carbonite, but I am ok with having the primary storage in the internet since I will likely still keep archives on CD in case Google (or the reputable company of choice) gets rid of the service.

What are you thoughts? Will Picassa suit my needs or do you have another recommendation?

[baycruisers]

Picasa will store full sized files and you can upgrade your storage capacity pretty cheaply. (20 GB for $5/year all the way to 1 TB for $256/year). Check the "upgrade storage" link on your Picasa home page.

Microsoft's Skydrive allows you to store 25 GB free. Amazon's S3 services also provides low cost cloud storage.

[kirbinster]

Flickr keeps the full size of your originals.

[baycruisers]

Originally Posted by kirbinster

Flickr keeps the full size of your originals.

True. Hadn't thought of them. Smugmug, Pbase and other photo hosting sites will also store full size images.

One thing to ask yourself, do you want to save all versions of an image or just some? For example, for a given image I might have a JPG, a RAW file, a DNG file, and a PSD file. That's a lot of megabytes to upload, so you might want to give some thought to an archiving strategy before picking your storage host.

[Angelsong]

Shutterfly.com has free, unlimited, online storage of your full size photos. Uploading is slow, but its a great service for no charge.