Online Storage for photos
 

Greeting All

Has anyone used any of the online storage websites to backup their digital photos, etc while travelling?

I've found this site

ADrive.com – 50GB of Free Online Storage & Backup

It has huge storage and free (at the moment anyway) and apart from the online advertising it seems like a good deal, or are there hidden drawbacks?

Any comments?

Regards

Ian J

Most of the popular sites like flickr, photobucket & smugmug offer larger storage for a fee. If this was your only back-up, I would go with a trusted site that has been around for a while, than an unknown.

I was using the free Photobucket for years, but during this recent trip I found the amount of bandwidth used began to be excessive. By this I mean, my photos are linked to my blog, so the more people that looked, the more I used. I just recently paid for the Pro version and get pretty much unlimited BW, plus no more ads.

If you just want them for storage, I highly reccomend them, but you may need to check into the maximum file size they will accept in free mode

Cheers
TS

Thanks for the info,

What I had in mind was instead of finding a place to copy photos onto a CD/DVD and then posting them home during a trip was to copy them onto an online storage service and then get someone at home to download them so they wouldn't need to stay on the server for long.

BBeast What size storage does Flikr offer? The 50Gb that Adrive offer is more than I would normally need.

Strom sounds like a good trip I've been reading your blog

Thanks All

Ian J

At home, I use Dropbox https://www.getdropbox.com/
The free storage is "only" 2GB. But if you have the client set up on your (or a friend's) computer at home, it will automatically store those to your hard drive. Once the files are moved out of that folder, they are deleted from the service, and you have your full 2GB available again.
Never tried to use it on the road though...

I've been with Adrive for a while and never had a problem, in the past I've used it to transfer photos and videos home, by doing just what you say, uploading and then getting someone (my mum) at the other end to download.

There's always that nagging doubt that they might disappear for ever so I make sure my mum knows I'm uploading, usually by Skyping her while I'm doing it, and I also don't delete them from my hard-drive till I know she's got them all.

Mind you I've just picked up some 16gb SDHC cards for €20 each, so that way I can back up onto those too. I figure the more copies floating around the better.

I've been reading about yet another standard for SD cards, SDXC, which means memory cards of up to 2 terrabytes! Pretty soon that's got to be the way to go (until you lose the card of course).

flickr works well
 

i use flickr. costs $US25 a year, easy to use. i let my membership lapse for several months. they didn't let me know or bill me, i just couldn't download large files. no drama, paid my dues and all was in order, nothing lost.
cheers,
andy.

oh and i might warn against having too many copies of photos - only causes a disorderly hassle and burns up hard drive space when you get home. but of course that's better than not backing up at all.

Go Flickr for sure!
 

Hey Ian,

I have been using Flickr for a long time now and am very happy with it. Whilst on a bike tour I use it whenever i get to a good interenet connection and uploading is super quick. However if you dont have a pro account you are limited to 200 photos. Here you have two choices, buy a pro account for like 15pounds ($25 i think) or just open numerous accounts. I highly reccommend it not only because you can store photos in their original sizes and download thumbnails, small, medium and large sizes of your photos whenever you want, and so can others if you so choose, but also it is a fantastic oppurtunity for your photos to be viewed by others and is an awesome community of people where one can find friends and/or use it to develop your photography skills should you so wish....

This is me.... Flickr: vagusboy's Photostream

Oh yeah, and its super easy to link your flickr account everywhere...i.e. extrernal sites/blogs etc...

Hope that helps!!
Mike
ps.. and once your pro, you dont have to deal with advertising either!! :)

I wouldn't rely on anything that is free for something important. An extra backup yes but not one I was relying on.

One point to note here on uploading large or many files to the net. I am having extreme difficulty finding a decent enough connection so that I can upload my smaller resized photos. I would have no chance with the full 3MB pictures, let alone RAW not unless I spent a lot of time in internet cafes, which I would prefer not to do.

I have an external HDD which is synced to my computer, when the DVDs have arrived home and been checked, I can now delete them for the space on the laptop .

DVD for me :)

Cheers
TS

My experience with smugmug over the past 5 years has been very positive.

In one case, I made an order for prints and noticed shortly afterward that I had goofed part of the shipping address. I e-mailed smugmug support about it, and seven minutes later received a reply (from a live human!) stating that the mistake had been corrected.

There is also a support forum at Digital Grin Photography Forum - Powered by vBulletin.

can you email them to a mate to put on CD for you?

MS Skydrive & Mesh
 

I not a Microsoft fan but I have been using the MS Mesh service for over 12 months now with no real problems. Its a good way to sync local folders to a web storage point. You could upload the files from a net cafe (if they have a good upload speed) and then sync them to a computer somewhere else. ie your mums, brothers, friends. You can't upload more than one file at a time through the web interface but you can at the sync folder on the remote computer. So zip or rar files are the go. 5 Gb free.

www.mesh.com

Another Microsoft resource is the Skydrive. It can't sync but you get 25Gb for free. Once again you can't up load folders but you can queue multiple files (max 50Mb) to upload.

SkyDrive - Windows Live

+1 for smugmug.com .. :thumbup1: .. they're a good bunch of folks IMHO.




.

Got Flickr. Very good, easy to use, allows you to upload at original size. I pay $25 a year for the pro account which has unlimited storage. No complaints at all.

These days however, if I was going on a big trip, I would not delete any picture that I wanted to keep off my compact flash/sd card. They are so cheap these days that you can buy enough to keep thousands upon thousands of pix on. I recntly bought two Sandisc 4GB SD cards for 8 quid. Enough for something like 1000 large pix (per card) from my Canon G10, despite its ludicrously large CCD. And flash cards are very robust storage.

I'd just buy enough cards that I didn't have to delete any. (Although you are right, its good to back up).

Matt :)

Does anyone have any experience of using Google's Picasa? I've got some photos on their site but have never used it away from home.

Geoff

Pics
 

We,ve been on the road for a year and a half now and I,ve been using google, my photos, its linked to my Gmail account, its free and we can post pics to the Blog easily, however I am not the greatist computer expert in the world , so this works for us its real simple. Pete n Brucella

Google's Picasa is very good: Picasa 3: Free download from Google

Its free bandwidth (for linking pics and albums on blogs and forums etc) and the first 1gb of storage is completely free if you sign up for google (which also gives you free webmail).

You can get 20gb top up for $5 a year ..

The software is great for organizing albums, rotating and tagging images and uploading them to Google.

I used to use Jalbum as well but Picasa now offers free hosting, there's no need to pay hostage fees elsewhere, which can quickly become ridiculous when you start needing GB's of disk space etc. Great if you run your own server tho .. but who does? Hehe.

Another vote for Flickr. I bought a membership so I would have unlimited uploads at full resolution while on my 10 month trip to South America. Using the Flickr Uploadr software on my netbook, I could prepare the upload offline, and when I stayed somewhere with wifi, I would let it run overnight while sleeping.

At the risk of stating the bleeding obvious, most of the storage problems mentioned here can be solved with proper editing before uploading. Why wait until there are thousands of pictures to sift through - and to pay for the privilege to save them all? It has to be done sometime, so it makes sense to do it immediately after each photo stop while the shot is still fresh in the mind and the camera is still in your hands. Just my thoughts.

Most of my photos were taken on the move or in time limited travel areas. Looking at an LCD screen in direct sunlight is not the way to edit photos, take a heap and sort them at your leisure.

Has anyone ever succeeded in editing 20 gig of photos - or even half that? Sounds like punishment. :(
My suggestion is, be more discerning (bolshie) when editing and make time to do it. It's a good habit.

Well, I guess it depends on what and how you are doing things.

As I was doing a daily blog, I got to resize and watermark my photos every day, then sit back and write the blurb and delete what I did not need, then upload the remainder, which was only a chore on a slow connection. Actually uploading full size photos was not an option at most of the connections I was able to access, although I know some who did.

I'm with Matt... loads of cheap SD cards and just upload 640x800 images of stuff you really want to and sort the rest when you have the bandwidth do do it.
IMPO, of course :innocent:

John

Smugmug here... started by the same guy who started Adventurerider.com so that's a bonus IMO

+1 for: smugmug.com

nice for videos (full-hd) as well.

Possible to switch off all these "twitter and facebook things",
if you don't need it.

Hi,

Wow interesding to see a lot of you allready using the new way of saving fotos on a "clowd".

So far i could not use things like that while traveling because the bandwidth available in africa etc usuarly was not even enouth to email one single foto home.

Even here in Germany i dont habe the bandwith to upload 20 Gig of fotos. It allready takes the whole night to upload a 2 GB Video to youtube.

I do have 5 GB Webspace to publish fotos in the internet: Therefore i pay 1 Euro per month with unlimited bandwith + Domain.

LG, Tobi

Thats the prob while travelling in general, not many places give much bandwidth to the uploads. So unless you compress the hell out of the pictures you are kinda stuck. I try to only upload txt and a few choice photos.

It will get better in time tho.