All,

It occurred to me on a recent family vacation that my family's digital photo collection (going back to 2001) is piecemeal all over the place--everyone has their own images on their own hard drives (and many aren't backed up), and there's no one place where we can pool and record what we've taken for the future. Thus, I'm looking for a cloud-based sharing and storage solution. Does anyone have any suggestions of services that meet some/many the following criteria?

*Cloud based (my family is unlucky when it comes to floods, accidents, etc., storing it on a drive in someone's home is a recipe for trouble).
* Easily sharable (ie, individuals can have linked accounts where we can each access the main collection).
*Scalable/large. We're probably going to have somewhere around 100GB in photos total, so space is necessary.
*Not TOO expensive. I've given up on free, but ideally we'd pay a max of about $100/year.
*Easy to use. I'm fairly tech friendly, but many of the other folks using this won't be (and we're all Mac people). Thumbnails would be great, if possible, but I'm realistic, so it's not necessary.
*Private. I'd rather not have photos of my great uncle in drag on a dare floating around the internet if I can help it.
*Preserves the original file. I shoot RAW, and I'd like to store and be able to reclaim original photo files (or at least high rez jpgs). I have this nightmare that I would upload and the photos would be shrunk, meaning that I could never print them at size again.

I've looked at Dropbox (too expensive), Amazon Cloud Drive (clunky, no sharing, and you have to upload each file manually--no folders), Flickr (too public), Photosy (has anyone touched this in years?), Insync, Smugmug, etc.

I'm sure that I'm not the first person to have this question--is there a good answer that I'm not seeing? Or is there a good workaround/hack that I haven't seen? What do other folks do?

Thanks so much--

I was going to recommend SmugMug, but you have that listed. What didn't you like? Unlimited storage, privacy controls, multiple redundancy /mirrors on Amazon's S3 fabric, $40/yr basic or $60/yr to enable customization and video, stores full-res JPEGs (unlike others, they don't downres. RAW storage isn't really photo storage, it's just file storage). You can't get much easier than the drag-and-drop uploader.

It is a bit difficult to fully customize, but there are plenty of templates and if you want to do html layout and CSS scripting, you're better of doing a domain name/hosting on your own anyway.

I've been a happy Power-level user for nearly 7 years. They also run dgrin.com with a very responsive support system fior SmugMug users.

Zenfolio is the only other one that was comparable last I looked.



(Shameless plug - you can use coupon code G171UaFcXSOjA and get $5 off. Yes, I get a credit also)

See also this thread

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/trave...tos-scans.html

Not sure what the pushback is on Flickr. You can control the privacy of your pictures on a per album basis. Upgrading to the Pro version for $25 is a no brainer.

My two cents.

I've been playing with smugmug for the past day or so, and for some reason, I'm finding it a bit hard to work with. That said, it's a front-runner. One big question remains--is there a way to have multiple individuals upload to a single account (ie, if I wanted to give my father and my sister their own passwords, can they send photos to my account?), or do I just give them my name and password and let them play me for a while?

I read it before posting--it's similar to what I'm looking for, but I'm much less concerned about free (though it'd be nice) and whether the site exists two decades from now. But thanks for the link--it pointed me to smugmug, which I'm currently playing with.

Def don't compromise quality when storing online. Nothing worse then low res images!