Travel Photography - Best cloud or photo site for HUGE amount of photos and scans

My father just died and I need to upload all of his photos from Apple I photo and scan all of his Eastman Kodak paper photos to a site or cloud that will be working for generations to come. First I would like to know this cloud storage place will be working for a long long time after I am dead and other family members can access it. Second, I would like the site to be free. Third I would like to upload large files so anyone could download and enlarge a photo if they like it. Also it would be nice if you could view from web and organize from web. I had a bad experience with Yahoo many years ago when they shut down or merged a online photo cloud.

Any thoughts or suggestions. fyi..size guess is 100s of gigs

Hundreds of gigabytes and free seems to be a tough combination.

Are you looking just to store? I have 250GB with Carbonite at $50/year or so.

If you're looking for photo viewing and only images and videos, I have a few dozen GB at Smugmug, which is in the same price range.

I don't think anyone can predict who will still be in business and available decades from now - 3 years is probably optimistic.

There are several threads in Travel Technology about backing up files - you need to keep these on DVD, BlueRay, external hard drives, etc, as a backup regardless of any online choice

Sorry to hear that your father passed on. :(

I have to agree that finding a long term, set it and forget it solution will be tough since the internet is so dynamic. Make sure you have access to decent upload speeds. I recently tried uploading some picture files to my SharePoint site, and that took several hours with my Sprint aircard and a EVDO signal.

I want the site free so if I die and someone forgets to pay it will be around.

I want site to have a long life so if I die my heirs can view.

I want the site to be a cloud so family around the world can access.

Does anyone think Google Documents could work?

For non google document files, I believe Google or Picassa only give you 1 GB for free.

I don't think you will find anything that fits the huge size you need and free and forever.

You can store unlimited pictures on google +, but they get resized to a smaller size (2048 pixels). If it's just to view on screen, that may be the best way to go.

Ok if I gave up the no cost requirement what would be the best? My fear is that I or someone will forget to pay the company and everything will vanish.

I'm not sure that forgetting to pay for an internet service would be an issue. For instance, eFax charges my credit card every month without fail. In cases where I want to manually authorize a payment, I can set set up email reminders of when an invoice or statement is available for viewing.

I would consider just getting a domain of your own to set the site up on, install one of the many photo album packages that are available, and use that. You can set up the domain to automatically bill you and it will be up "forever" or until you or a designated person removes it.

It will be a bit of work up front but I think that in the end it will be the best solution.


Edit: Photobucket Pro is also an option as it is only $24.95/year and includes "unlimited" storage. I use Photobucker Pro to host images for my blog.

A domain of my own would require backups RAID servers and a fire, natural diaster safe place. I want to put this up and make it simple stupid.

Actually it would require you to buy a domain name, and hosting someplace and just upload all your pictures there.

They will do the backups, they have it in a safe place, etc.

Doesn't solve the what if you don't pay thing, but will take care of pretty much else.

Shutterfly is free and unlimited, and has great tools for creating share sites

My wife has done a couple for us
Http://Troyandmollyalloverthemap.shutterfly.com
Http://Layladog.shutterfly.com

I personally use smugmug.com. A while back, they moved their infrastructure into the Amazon EC2 cloud and its distributed across multiple zones. Their storage is unlimited as is their transfer and its about $50/year. Their service is top notch and no ads.

Should something happen to you, you could leave instructions in a will to have someone pick up the tab, etc.

I personally use smugmug.com.

I'm very happy there. I'd suggest the OP look at a couple of different sites maintained by posters here to get a feel for what works best for him. Mine is linked below. Reliability is very important for me as I update from around the world and smugmug is reliable.

Wow - there are lots of people looking for it also! Especially genealogists who are worried about the lost material that is being deleted/hard drive wiped/account not being paid up. Just imagine - the letter your grandfather wrote 100 years ago can still survive all these years. Can the same be said of an email that was sent last week - accidently deleted/not printed, etc.

I think the LDS church is probably looking for answers to the huge problem of archiving all these digital assets (as well as the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration).

As someone suggested in this thread:

1. Get a domain - as long as the bill is paid (perhaps setting up some kind of a trust???? through a bank??? that would survive after your death (as long as your trust has assets to pay for the continued bills).

I've just started using http://aws.amazon.com - but am not familiar enough with it as of yet to recommend it for a long term storage location.

Good luck and keep this thread updated if you find any solutions that you decide meet your criteria.

First I would like to know this cloud storage place will be working for a long long time after I am dead and other family members can access it. Second, I would like the site to be free. Third I would like to upload large files so anyone could download and enlarge a photo if they like it. Also it would be nice if you could view from web and organize from web. I had a bad experience with Yahoo many years ago when they shut down or merged a online photo cloud.

Any thoughts or suggestions. fyi..size guess is 100s of gigs

My fear is that I or someone will forget to pay the company and everything will vanish.

I've given up on cloud storage even way back before it was called the "cloud". Too many paid services packing up and leaving.

The reality is that there's just no guarantee that anything will be around for a long time on the internet. Who knows that the internet will look like in 20 years.

Personally, for my own photo collection, I use my own hosted domain and use zenphoto as an album. But I'm not using it to store the original high quality versions of the photos, and a lot of web hosting places aren't going to be thrilled with that if you're going with a shared hosting plan (even the "unlimited" ones often have some hidden limits).

Of course, I'm not overly convinced that anyone cares about my photos now, so the odds that someone will care in 50 years is probably not very high :).

www.schrock.org/photos/

But I'm not using it to store the original high quality versions of the photos, and a lot of web hosting places aren't going to be thrilled with that

This is the "beauty" of a site like Shutterfly. It's in their best interest to store your photos at high resolution on the chance that someone will order a large print (or a photo book, or whatever). The cost of storage is miniscule compared to the profit they will make on selling a copy.

This is the "beauty" of a site like Shutterfly. It's in their best interest to store your photos at high resolution on the chance that someone will order a large print (or a photo book, or whatever). The cost of storage is miniscule compared to the profit they will make on selling a copy.

Yeah, but you also give them a right to use your photos pretty much for whatever purpose they want.

Also in their agreement is that you're supposed to have written consent of every identifiable individual in your photos to allow "for purposes of using and otherwise exploiting the Submission in the manner contemplated by these Terms (including for purposes of promoting the Service)".

Yeah, but you also give them a right to use your photos pretty much for whatever purpose they want.

Also in their agreement is that you're supposed to have written consent of every identifiable individual in your photos to allow "for purposes of using and otherwise exploiting the Submission in the manner contemplated by these Terms (including for purposes of promoting the Service)".

I think you will find these kinds of terms on ANY photo hosting website, including Facebook.

If you post your photos online, anywhere, they WILL get stolen and used without your permission. If you want the convenience of sharing them with family members, etc, you'll have to learn to live with it. At least sites like Shutterfly (especially if you pay for a Pro membership) give people the ability/option to do the right thing and purchase it properly. If you were to host your own website, people would not even have the option, and would just flat steal them.

I am no expert on these services, but just want to let you know that there is a website called Backify which lets you take a backup of upto 512 GB for free. My 2 cents! :)

If you want large amounts of storage in addition to an interface that can be used for uploading, tagging, etc. I would recommend Picasa. 200Gb of space is $50 / year. Plus Google is more likely than most Internet operations to have a reasonable lifespan.

No one seems to have mentioned Flickr... I use it and there are no restrictions on size (other than 20mb per JPEG)- Which'd be pretty hard to go over anyways.

Get a pro account and it's only £15 a year, bargain!

Tom

If you want real piece of mind, just go for the hard drive route... Cheap and you can do with it as you wish :)

I use a Flickr pro account but there isn't any company that can offer you what you want.

Not one single company can say they will be here in 5-10 years to come let alone generations. Not one single company can say they will be free for ever.

As said before find a hosting company but then again who knows what will change there. The only sure fire way is to host on many different sites and then back up and store.

No free lunch.

There are many options out there, you won't find a free solution that gives you all you want.

Flickr is probably on the cheap end with the Pro account. Smugmug is used by many photographers and it's probably middle of the road.

If I recall correctly you want:

- 100s of gigs of storage
- photos accessible online
- long life
- lowest price (reframing the problem)


If you don't mind having some involvement, you can buy one of the NAS solutions that offer cloud access/mirroring/backups.

QNAP for example sells NAS boxes that will hold all your data and serve all your media (local and remote). They also offer syncing to other NAS boxes and potentially cloud services like Amazon's S3 (though that gets expensive for 100s of gigs).

Your own domain might be a good choice as well, but I'm not sure if many offer reliable backup for cheap. Some place like dreamhost gives you lots of storage but prices can still add up ($100/year).


Summary, flickr is probably cheapest but not the most flexible.

You can see lots of info on wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_photo_sharing_websites