Digital Photo Storage Choices
How should you begin your digital photo storage? What methods should you use to organize all those digital pictures?
Perhaps everything has just got out of control!
Before you can organize your photos in an easy way, let's discuss the methods that you can use.
Photo Sharing Sites
These sites allow you to store and share your digital photos. You can create photo albums online for yourself and/or others to view. Once
you have added your photos, you can email someone the web address for direct access to your images and photo collections.
Each photo sharing site looks and works a little differently. For example, some have ads and others do not. The look of the albums differ and what features they offer can vary.
Recommended sites for photo sharing and digital photo storage:
Picasa Web Album - If you store up to 1GB of photos, Picasa Web Albums is free. The maximum size per picture you are allowed is 20MB. If you go above the 1GB, you must pay for extra storeage. An additiona 10GB will cost you $20/year, while 40GB would be $75/year. (Yikes!) Upload your photo(s), create an album, and email the address to anyone you like so that they may view them at this site. Picasa Web Album (review)
Webshots - free to upload 5 photos within 24 hours. Unlimited uploads for a premium account which is currently $29.88 per year.
Shutterfly - free digital photo storage - a popular site for sharing and storing photos. You can also order prints from them. Shutterfly (review)
SmugMug - $39.95 per year, but lots of great features and a nice site. SmugMug (review)
Facebook Pictures - Along with being a social site, you can upload and create photo albums on Facebook. A nice feature for your digital photo storage is extensive privacy options. Read my simple tutorial on Facebook Pictures.
Fotki - This is an excellent site with so many features. For photo backup and digital photo storage, I like the fact that it keeps your original photo file size. This is a necessity if you are using a photo sharing site for backup also. Fotki is a site that is a lot of fun. It's a social site too and even has friendly photo contests. Fotki (review)
Flickr - Flickr allows you 100MB storage per month with a photo size limit of 10MB. For $24.95/year, you can store an unlimted amount of pictures on Flickr and each photo can be a maximum of 20MB. Just like Fotki, the Pro account will archive your original photos.
When deciding upon a photo sharing site, consider what your main purposes are. Photo sharing sites may offer many of the same features, but some may have options that others don't. To read more about this, visit my page
Web Photo Sharing, where I list things to consider.
Organize Digital Photos (on your computer)
Organizing your digital photos on your own computer can be confusing. What's with all the folders and files in My Pictures? Well, once you understand how My Pictures is organized, it's easy!
Then you will know how and where to put your digital images for quick access and logical grouping. I have written a good tutorial on how to organize digital photos.
You can also use software to do this which makes things easy. Picasa 3 is very good..and it is free. Go to my page on Picasa 3 to learn about it and how it works. It's pretty easy!
Do you have some videos you made and are not quite sure how to get them onto your Blog or Website? Web Video Zone is a site that will store your videos. You can then take the code and add it to your Website or Blog, as I did here.
Portable Digital Photo Album
These portable devices allow you to view your photos without a computer. There are many different kinds available.
One in particular, PictureBook, has built in memory and allows you to bring your digital photos with you, wherever you go. You can even sort pictures by category. You can easily transfer your photos from you computer by a USB wire, or you can just insert your camera's memory card into the device.
Return From Digital Photo Storage to Home Page