Best Online Photo Storage

[B Ozanne]

Where is the best place to store a large collection of photos at full resolution? For free.

I have about 700 wedding photos that I would like to get online fairly quickly at full resolution. Total size is around 3.1gb. I'm not too concerned about them getting stolen, as I would like friends and family to be able to view and print them if they choose.

Considering the large quantity it would also help if they had a good upload program.

Thanks.

 

[Dan Cook]

flickr maybe?

 

[Ryan McGinnis]

Flickr, but it's not for free if you want to store that many. That said, if you can't put out $25 a year unlimited for multi-location offsite protected data storage, then online photo hosting probably isn't for you.

 

[Van DeWald]

Ryan, do you have any recommendations for that $25 a year site for unlimited data backup?

 

[B Ozanne]

What about Fotki?

 

[Eric Flescher]

I use iPhoto but most of you don't use Macs. Before I go further please tell us
(1) resolution of the photos
(2) kind of camera you use
(3) do you also have a hard drive backup or ?

Shutterfly is not too bad
http://www.shutterfly.com


:::

Where is the best place to store a large collection of photos at full resolution? For free.

I have about 700 wedding photos that I would like to get online fairly quickly at full resolution. Total size is around 3.1gb. I'm not too concerned about them getting stolen, as I would like friends and family to be able to view and print them if they choose.

Considering the large quantity it would also help if they had a good upload program.

Thanks.

 

[Terry Tyler]

i dont know any site thats going to give you 3.1 GB of storage...

i assumed this thread was about free-online photo storage...i have always used photobucket, some people use flicker...

i have well over 170 photos on my photobucket account, and i wonder if there even is a limit...

like i said, as far as large size photos...i have no idea...

 

[B Ozanne]

I'm not worried about backup or hard drive storage. I'm looking to get these photos online so friends and family can view and print them at their discretion.

Each photo is about 4-7mb in size.

I know Picasa gives you 2gb of storage at whatever resolution you want. I also think I could trim about 50% of these photos out of the mix.

 

[Skip Talbot]

Is it necessary to store the photos at full resolution online? I'd resize them down to screen resolution and compress them modestly. You don't have to go down to 400x300 web resolution, but your friends aren't going to download 3.1 GB of images in their spare time. Heck, asking them to download a few 7MB images is asking a lot. Resize them down to 1280x1024 or 1024x768. Otherwise you are going to get complains that images don't fit on the screen, are stretched and distorted, or take too long to download.

If you need them full resolution, then going the freeloaders route is probably not a good idea. 3.1 GB of data takes a long time to download anywhere, but I can only imagine how long it will take on a free data storage site. Drop a few bucks on a hosting company that will give you several gig of web storage on your own domain name.

 

[B Ozanne]

4-7mb in size? they will not print out very well I don't think
you need 72 dpi
also you need certain amount for making photos of certain sixes 4 by 6 etc
:::

4 megabytes isn't big enough to print a 4x6? Not sure where that is coming from. Generally, 300dpi is considered photo quality. Just looking at one of my photos it is 3800 pixels by 2600 pixels. Easily enough pixels for an excellent 8"x12".

No, my friends aren't going to download 3.1gb of data. They are likely going to look at modest sized thumbnails and only download the 3 or 4 full sized photos they want to print.

 

[Robert Dewey]

I dunno Bill... I think I would go with Flickr as well: http://www.flickr.com/upgrade/

You're going to be hard-pressed to find anything cheaper with those terms. Unlimited bandwidth is something to think about as well - you might find something with unlimited storage, but it's pretty useless if bandwidth is limited.

If you were just looking for storage (which you said you're not), then Amazon S3 is the best at $0.15/GB for storage. I use that to backup about 15GB for just a couple bucks a month...

Again, I would personally go with Flickr...

 

[Ryan McGinnis]

Ryan, do you have any recommendations for that $25 a year site for unlimited data backup?

That'd be Flickr. Of course, this only applies to photo data. But you can upload as much as you want; there is no limit or bandwidth quota. Also, if you do not decide to renew your $25 subscription at the end of the year, the data does not get deleted, though you can't access it again until you resubscribe. I have several thousand full resolution JPEGS on Flickr, all keyword indexed and easily retreivable from anywhere that has an internet connection.

 

[Terrence Cook]

Webshots.com

I have hundreds on there.

 

[Robert Dewey]

I think it helps to link to the plans for each of these services mentioned. For Webshots, you can find it here: http://www.webshots.com/html/matrix.html