Share your photos online

Jenn — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 15:06:07 +0000

Whether you’re the queen of a Nikon SLRs or the king of Canon DSLRs, one thing is certain: you’re going to want to show off your favorite photos! Many people use various online storage methods as a solution for storing and showcasing photos, but in the interest of saving time — and money — you should consider using a service that is just for the storage and sharing of photos.

My personal favorite is Flickr, but another great alternative is Zoomr (though on further exploration it looks as though the company behind Zoomr revamped it as a text/picture message social networking utility, so it may not be your best bet — try Picasa instead!). Both allow you to store as many photos as you want on their servers (though Flickr requires you to have a PRO account if you’d like to store more than 200 photos; without a PRO account you won’t be able to see any photos you’ve uploaded beyond the initially allowed 200), and both offer a variety of organization settings (albums, individual sets, tags, etc.) to allow you to sort and display your photos as you see fit.

If you do put your photos online and allow them to be viewed by others (all photo sharing websites offer some sort of privacy setting; Flickr seems to be the most generous in terms of configuring different privacy settings for collections, sets, and individual photos), keep in mind that they can potentially be taken and claimed by others. You may wish to protect your photos by adding a watermark to them.

Back up your photos!

Jenn — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 16:25:24 +0000

As a [personal, non-professional, I-do-it-because-I-love-it] photographer, nothing pains me more than the idea of losing any of the photos I have taken. To date I have been taking digital photos for, no lie or exaggeration, seven years. And while I’m the queen of preaching the importance of photo back ups to others, I unfortunately didn’t always take my own advice. In April of 2007, reformatting two computers (I have a desktop and a laptop) and transferring photos here, there and everywhere for temporary storage while doing so resulted in me losing about a month’s worth of photos. And of course the photos lost were from December 2006, and plenty of them featured my then five month old son. I was devastated. I was able to recover the few that I had uploaded to Flickr (an online photo storage solution), but they were resized and had watermarks on them. Trust me, that was a hard lesson to learn. And since then, I have been vigilant with photo storage. Here are some ideas that you can consider.

Upload your photos to a photo storage website. You could use a photo sharing website like Flickr or Zoomr (don’t worry, you have the option to set photos as “private”!)
Store photos and other important data with a generic online storage site, like Box.net or Mozy
Burn photos to disc — CD-R, DVD-R, or even Bluray
Synchronize your photos between multiple computers
Use an external hard drive for photo storage

As for me, my experience with losing photos has led me to uploading photos to Flickr, burning photos to disc on a monthly basis (the .JPGs only), synchronizing my photos between my two computers, and storing my raw format photos (.NEF) on an external hard drive. You could call me paranoid, but at least I won’t be without a single one of my photos!

Camera Sleuth » photo storage

Share your photos online

Back up your photos!