Tech Blog

[#1]

The holiday season is upon us, which means that we’ll be enjoying time spent with family and friends. Many of us will grab our handy camera-enabled data phones and snap priceless shots that we’ll want to share, and keep for posterity.
 
But that’s where the tech can get a bit tricky. Sure, we’ve tried sharing to our various Facebook, Flickr and Picasa accounts, but what about the ‘saving for posterity’ part.
 
Photos in the Cloud 
Well, two of those three services mentioned above are a great start. Here’s the four that I’ve seen and used that will offer solid photo service over the holidays and into the future:

• Flickr offers a Pro level account (about $25 per year for unlimited photo and video storage) that will keep all your photos online and available. Free gives you unlimited storage, but only your most recent 200 photos are viewable. Online image editing provided by Picnik.
• Picasa has a free account that offers 1GB of free photo storage and basic image editing tools.
• SmugMug is pricier, offers three levels of service, and is geared toward the more serious photographer.
• Adobe Photoshop Express gives you access to basic online photo editing and organization tools, and 2GB of free photo storage. Additional storage space can be purchased annually.

 

So, what’s so great about storing your photos online anyway? 

1. Backup -- you don’t have to worry about keeping your images safe; the service you’re using does that.
2. Sharing -- easy to embed the images into blogs, email and twitter messages. Each photo usually has a public URL that’s sharable (or private, if that’s your thing).
3. Printing -- a few of the services are offering partnerships with professional printing labs which lets you produce photobooks, custom prints etc.
4. Integration -- some of the more popular services are already integrated into your iPhone camera applications (such as Instragram). Push a button and your latest shot is uploaded to the service, ready for you to edit and share.

Local storage? 
Yep, you can keep your photos on your own computer, but you do run risks should your computer crash or worse. I do keep the majority of my images at home, stored on a network attached storage device that’s got two drives, one a mirror of the other. So if one should die, I’ve got a copy of my data on the other.
 
Also, I backup my photos weekly, and move the backup drive to an offsite location for even greater safety. Yeah, a housefire would ruin a lot of things, but I know my photos and other important data would be safe.
 
Your needs? 
It depends. Take a solid think about what you plan to do with your photos, how you want to share them, and how important they are to you (can you afford to lose them?). I’ve likely given you some ideas to try and experiment with as we head into the holidays. I’d love to hear what you’ve tried and how it worked (or didn’t).

[#2]

While it cost $2 a month, my friends and I love flickr.  Started in Vancouver 2004, it's amazing how popular the site has grown.

In addition to photo-sharing, flickr allows me to send out "private guest passes" for more personal family images.  The collections and sets makes it easy to organize images.  One of my favourite features is the geotagging capabilities where it automatically creates a map at where my geotagged images were taken.

Some of these features can now be found at other web-sharing sites.

[#3]

XL: yeah, there are lots of different features offered by many of those sites. I too use Flickr as my main photo sharing site, and Photoshop Express is my secondary one. I'd never tried the Guest Pass feature of Flickr...never thought of it actually, just share my stuff or don't

Thanks for adding your thoughts!

--Brad

[#4]

Flickr Guest passes is a very flexible way for me to share vacation images..... http://www.flickr.com/help/guestpass/

Here's my workflow steps coming back from vacation....

1) Select which pictures I plan to upload onto flickr on my computer folder.  Apply processing when needed necessary.  Geotag images with RoboGeo.

2) Upload images onto flickr "privately" into a "set"

3) Name the flickr set my vacation theme

4) Make the scenery images "public" for all to see

To create my "guest pass"

1) Open the vacation flickr set

2) Click "share this" at the upper right corner

3) Check "Private" or your desired security level

4) Click "grab the link" to build your guest pass

For co-workers I will share general set URL.  For family I will send out the "guest pass" that enables them to see the public images, as well as the family pictures from the trip.

If there is more than one audience, I can create another Flickr set with the similar images loaded onto that new set.  Another "guest pass" can be created for that different audience.

[#5]

Nice! Mine's similar, except I offload everything to my internal server, prune, edit etc in lightroom, then upload the survivors to flickr.

Thanks for the details on guestpass -- must check it out.