What online photo storage site do you use?

[ebinmaine 67,432]

NOT counting the Google's, how do you store your photos in the cloud?

 

I'm not opposed to the idea of using SD cards but it's not practical for me.  

 

 

[nylyon-(Admin) 7,273]

Why not counting Google?  Mine are stored in 3 places.  One, I have a Mac-Mini with a lot of storage attached and backed up.  We also have a lot of iPhones, and pay for the additional iCloud storage.  And finally I use Google to store a LOT of things including pictures

 

[ebinmaine 67,432]

7 minutes ago, nylyon said:

Why not counting Google

I should put a disclaimer right here in the first line stating that my issue is much more likely mine than theirs to learn how to run my stupid phone....

 

I'm using Google right now and I can't honestly say I'm unsatisfied with it except that ½ a year ago I started paying 20 bucks a year when I got to a usage point of 15 G or whatever their storage unit is. 

It took me 4 years of using this website which is the only one I'm on, to get to that point.

Less than 6 months later I've nearly doubled that up to 28.

Of that 28, just a hair over 26 is photos along with a very small percentage being my email file. I know how to go through an empty that but it just won't help much.

My usage hasn't changed but something in the way files are stored, has. I can't figure out what that is. I am most certainly not going to keep adding and adding and adding to my capacity by doing the same thing to their wallet.

 

Trainer reminded me that if I make a video and it gets stored it's also stored on YouTube. That certainly doesn't need to be doubled. So those can be deleted. She also reminded me that if I take a picture because I wanted to put it on this site, I can delete it from my cloud account because it's already stored somewhere. The only issue I have with that is I'm not exactly the top notch A#1 world champion at searching things and I do occasionally go back through my pictures to find things based on when I think I may have done them.

 

 

[Handy Don 12,214]

Our current digital photo archive (~19 years worth now; using Lightroom) is well over 50,000 images. There are only a very few videos in there and it's ~42gb.

I am fairly rigorous about filtering out what isn't worth saving before they go into the archive--usually more than half of the images I capture at any given event. I also post process a lot of images to crop them which saves storage.

(For example, on one vacation I came back with over 1,600 images. I saved ~500, and created a slideshow for sharing with friends and family of the best 99--I think its cruel to inflict more than 100 images on anyone!)

Deleting images does take time, courage, and effort, of course.

We store on a local hard drive plus two dedicated backup drives connected only when doing backup or recovery.

Our two phones back up to iCloud storage ($12 per year each) but we regularly copy images and videos to/from the Lightroom archive to keep only what we want on hand on the phones so we don't need to go to a higher tier of storage.

As for Forum images, I keep some and ditch most. I use both my phone camera and a hi-res Sony digital. Before I post an images I always crop to only the essential part of the image, make any other needed adjustments, and then downsample from its original 3-6mb to <100kb before uploading it. This saves lots of space and lessens the load on the servers and communication connections.

[pfrederi 17,729]

We used to store pictures in big black albums with little stick on corner things to hold the pics in place...The came computers and we stored them on 5" floppies... then they were replaced by 3.5 inch not so floppies  then came CDs   to be replaced by DVDs.    Then thumb drives now SD cards and the cloud. (don't forget online like photo bucket  can you see them now???)  ... The only pics i can reliably see are the ones in the old black photo album books.  i still have a couple 3.5 in things with pics on them but have you got a 3.5" drive anywhere any more..... 

[953 nut 55,194]

18 hours ago, ebinmaine said:

SD cards

Most of the photos I take are downloaded to my laptop from the SD in my camera. I'm not smart enough to use a smart phone and why would I pay to store photos in the cloud that I probably won't ever look at again. Like Paul @pfrederi I had lots of stuff on floppy disks that will never be accessed again. When a SD card is nearly full I put it in an envelope with a bit of information on it so I know what is there. SD cards are only a couple bucks each so even if they aren't full it isn't a big deal. I also have a few flash drives that I've saved specific topical items like old family photos I've had digitized or have scanned. I had them stored on a disk but our newer computers don't have disk drives     with any luck the USB ports won't go away any time soon.

[cleat 5,927]

I use https://imgur.com/ whenever I need to upload a photo then give a link to someone to download it.

 

Red Square is nice because you can upload directly to the site but not all groups work that way.

 

[pfrederi 17,729]

46 minutes ago, 953 nut said:

Most of the photos I take are downloaded to my laptop from the SD in my camera. I'm not smart enough to use a smart phone and why would I pay to store photos in the cloud that I probably won't ever look at again. Like Paul @pfrederi I had lots of stuff on floppy disks that will never be accessed again. When a SD card is nearly full I put it in an envelope with a bit of information on it so I know what is there. SD cards are only a couple bucks each so even if they aren't full it isn't a big deal. I also have a few flash drives that I've saved specific topical items like old family photos I've had digitized or have scanned. I had them stored on a disk but our newer computers don't have disk drives     with any luck the USB ports won't go away any time soon.

 

 

Do not be too sure....

[nylyon-(Admin) 7,273]

I envision cloud services continuing on for quite some time, so storing your data in a Google / AWS cloud will currently be your best bet.  Of course there is no guarantee that there won't be prices associated with this storage, but you will get what you pay for.

[Handy Don 12,214]

10 minutes ago, pfrederi said:

 

 

Do not be too sure....

I've seen predictions that devices will have only wireless connections before long. 

Anyone interested in a 10 year old iPod that still works?

[ebinmaine 67,432]

1 minute ago, Handy Don said:

I've seen predictions that devices will have only wireless connections before long. 

Anyone interested in a 10 year old iPod that still works?

Careful with your pricing there sir. That's VINTAGE equipment in the electronics world. Automatically doubles the price.

 

[ebinmaine 67,432]

6 minutes ago, nylyon said:

I envision cloud services continuing on for quite some time, so storing your data in a Google / AWS cloud will currently be your best bet.  Of course there is no guarantee that there won't be prices associated with this storage, but you will get what you pay for.

 

I believe that to be true as well.

I suppose probably my best bet might be to muckle down and figure out why my storage usage went up so much so fast.  

[ri702bill 8,316]

On 11/17/2022 at 9:29 AM, ebinmaine said:

and figure out why my storage usage went up so much so fast.

All the images of the Pole Barn progress !!!

[ebinmaine 67,432]

43 minutes ago, ri702bill said:

All the images of the Pole Barn progress !!!

I wish it was that simple... 

[ebinmaine 67,432]

Folks I wanted to take a minute and update this thread with what I believe is going to be a solution for the time being...

 

I did some poking around and research and reading and watching and thinking and I discovered that my Google account was automatically backing up a little more than I thought.

 

It was my understanding that my pictures were being automatically backed up to the cloud as well as being saved to my own device.

 

Not necessarily a negative here but it also turns out that all of the videos I've made we're also being backed up to the cloud.

That's not something that I need to have done for several different reasons. Not the least of which is that if I want a video for future reference I would have already put it on YouTube. No need to back those up.

 

My account on Google was capable of storing 100 gb. I had 28 in there. Something like 16 or 17 of that was videos.

 

I went through and cleaned out every file over a certain size along with some minuscule stuff out of my email and that got me well below where I needed to be.