I'm looking for a service to store all my photos online. I'm moderately interested in sharing some pics / albums with family, but primarily I'd like a service that will keep full-quality copies of everything online. I only shoot JPEG, not RAW.
What's the best service for this? Currently, I don't use iPhoto except for the shots taken with my iPhone. I just sort my photos into folders based on name / date taken. I could be convinced to bring them all into iPhoto if that's the easiest way to manage them and get them online.
I'd love to hear what everyone else is using as an online backup and sharing service.
I'm looking for a service to store all my photos online. I'm moderately interested in sharing some pics / albums with family, but primarily I'd like a service that will keep full-quality copies of everything online. I only shoot JPEG, not RAW.
What's the best service for this? Currently, I don't use iPhoto except for the shots taken with my iPhone. I just sort my photos into folders based on name / date taken. I could be convinced to bring them all into iPhoto if that's the easiest way to manage them and get them online.
I'd love to hear what everyone else is using as an online backup and sharing service.
Bob
Depends on your needs. Mobile Me costs a yearly subscription, and if you're only using it to share photos it's certainly not worth it. However if you plan on using the other Mobile Me features, the photo gallery is nice. I personally found iDisk and Find my iPhone to be very handy, but the rest of the package doesn't really offer much of an edge, beyond being a bundle and easy to sync with a mac.
iPhoto can sync pictures with Flickr and Mobile Me, making publishing a snap if you use smart albums. Picasa has a plugin, but it's a manual process, much like facebook publishing was pre iLife '09. I'd use iPhoto if I were you, makes organizing your photos much easier. If you go the Picasa way, they have an app with the same features (locations and faces.)
I went from Mobile Me to Picasa, because I have 80Gb to eat up on my Google account. However, I think I might end up switching to Flickr.
Personally, I'd use Flickr, as the web interface is better and the service seems to be far more reliable than MobileMe.
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Thanks for the info, good to know that iPhoto can sync with Flickr. I guess step 1 is to get all my pics into iPhoto.
Does anyone know if MobileMe preserves and allows download of the full-res image? Are there storage limits on it? Checking the two out online, it seems like the mobile me galleries are nicer visually than Flickr.
Thanks for the info, good to know that iPhoto can sync with Flickr. I guess step 1 is to get all my pics into iPhoto.
Does anyone know if MobileMe preserves and allows download of the full-res image? Are there storage limits on it? Checking the two out online, it seems like the mobile me galleries are nicer visually than Flickr.
MobileMe can preserve the full-res image and add a download button if you want. the storage limit is around 20gb, since it's lumped in with your iDisk/email/MobileMe overall storage limit.
I also like that people can download entire albums in zip files, and that you can password protect albums... and that people can add photos to galleries as well.
Thanks guys - it looks like Flickr is the best choice, since it allows unlimited storage and unlimited bandwidth. MobileMe is capped at 20GB, and then you can pay extra to add another 40GB. I don't think the MobileMe value is there, but I'm still going to give it a whirl.
I'm still not crazy about the Flickr interface, but it seems pretty fast. I will test it more and make a decision, as I also organize all the photos into some iPhoto categories that make sense.
Location: Markham - Soon to be Mississauga, Ontario
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Quote:
Originally Posted by bob99
Thanks guys - it looks like Flickr is the best choice, since it allows unlimited storage and unlimited bandwidth. MobileMe is capped at 20GB, and then you can pay extra to add another 40GB. I don't think the MobileMe value is there, but I'm still going to give it a whirl.
I'm still not crazy about the Flickr interface, but it seems pretty fast. I will test it more and make a decision, as I also organize all the photos into some iPhoto categories that make sense.
But isn't Flickr capped per month? I think it is at 100MB. for the free account anyways.
Definitely look at Picasa also. You only get 2GB of free storage (as far as photos go) but can pay $5 for 20GB or $20 for 80GB more. It's actually quite easy to upload to Picasa from iPhoto - at least imo.
As for iPhoto, I think it's great at what it does. I don't find much use for the faces and places (day to day) and from what I've read it's not as good as Picasa's version of the same feature. However, for what I use it for, organizing, creating albums, sharing photos online, making photo books, calendars - I really like it. Mind you it took me a while to let go of that PC way of thinking when it came to organizing my photos and music for that matter - in other words doing everything manually.
Now I let iPhoto (and iTunes) do its job and back everything up via Time Machine (and additionally dump all my pics every few months or so onto a spare HD that I keep off site). This seems to be working out well so far.
Yes there are other apps that offer similar features to iPhoto, I used to use Picasa on my PC back in the day (and I thought it was great). For overall integration with your OS (being able to get photos in mail or iWork) it's fantastic though.
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