Just bought a Nikon D5100 and now I'm looking for a cloud storage to store the high resolution pictures from this camera. I'm looking for the following
- ability to store high resolution pictures, if I like to enlarge at later point of time
- Seems like you need to pay to store high resolution pictures, all free storage has limitations. Which works cheapest?
- I usually use Costco to print, so the storage website need not have capability to make print orders
- how do many people store photos, use paid online storage or use external hard drive
Cloud storage is not cost effective for storage of bulk photographs. I use cloud storage to share photographs but that's only ~ 5% of what I've actually shot. If you are seriously getting into photography your best best is to get dual hard drive enclosures and configure them for raid 1 (mirroring). You'll want to have 2 sets, one for onsite storage and one for offsite storage (you can keep it at a friends house or safe deposit box).
For cloud storage I use both Google Drive and Dropbox, both are good and reasonably priced.
I do use home computer+ external hard drive for backup at home, and use a cloud provider for long term offline storage.
After doing some research I chose to use amazon glacier as the backup solution. They only restriction with the glacier is, it is not free do download all the data at once, but given that this is not something I plan to do everyday, I am good with it.
As for pricing, for 100GB of data, monthly cost for glacier is $1, and for downloading all the data in case of a hard drive crash/disaster I need to pay another $1 which is not a big problem.
Because of the size/res limits on photo sites I tend to use "regular" online storage for my photos:
In terms of cloud storage that is free I recommend:
1. Dropbox (best interface, apps, etc-- but has least space and has the most expensive add on option)- 2gb free
2. Skydrive (most space, cheapest to buy additional space on)- 7gb free
3. Google Drive- 15gb
4. Amazon Cloud Drive (actually has the cheapest add-on storage, something like $25 a year for 50gb total shared between music) 5gb free, but add on space is super cheap
5. Box.net (I think has size limitations on free plan)
There are numerous cloud storage apps I am not mentioning.
I think for large databases of photos, some combination of skydrive, google drive are good to start out with for free. If you have very very large uploads, buying from skydrive and amazon is the cheapest as far as I can tell
rsw748 wrote:
- how do many people store photos, use paid online storage or use external hard drive
I use SmugMug and pay for their middle service. Unlimited storage, they keep the high-quality original files that I upload, I can upload video, and their print service is as good as it gets anywhere. I set up my storage to have a master folder for each year; within are various folders to keep the "master storage" folders private, a few photos of my choosing public, and separate folders for video, mine and my wife's cell phone photo storage, and one for my 4 year old's photos (all private). I upload as I shoot, sort out the best on an ongoing basis, and at year's end I print out copies of the best shots (with their print service) and give photo albums as gifts. Works. So. Well. Currently I have well over 25,000 files uploaded with a storage amount nearing 160 GB.
I also have two external drives (1 TB each) that I keep my photos and videos on.
" ... advice is most useful and at its best, not when it is telling you what to do, but when it is illuminating aspects of the situation you hadn't thought about." --nisiprius
rsw748 wrote:
- how do many people store photos, use paid online storage or use external hard drive
I'm grandfathered into the old $24/year Flickr account with unlimited storage, but for new users Flickr offers 1TB of free storage.
This requires some technical ability (at least some Solaris or Linux experience), I have a small HP Microserver which I use for network storage, it boots the free version of VMWare ESXi from an internal USB drive and runs an OmniOS virtual machine with 4x2TB drives in a RAID-Z (ZFS) array which offers 6TB of storage. ZFS offers better protection than hardware RAID since it also detects and automatically corrects data corruption (I think on average hard drives have 4 undetected bit errors per TB of written data). This is a very popular home storage setup, Google search for "Napp-It All-In-One" to get more information on setting it up. Then I use CrashPlan for Solaris to back it all up. If you're a little less technical a Synology Disk Station would be fine, it wouldn't offer protection against bit rot but would protect against a drive failure.
I also have an Eye-Fi memory card in the Camera which automatically uploads all files to the the Microserver and to Flickr (or just about any cloud service) when your camera is within Wifi range. I setup Eye-Fi to automatically delete pictures off the card after they've been uploaded so I never have to manually transfer or delete photos off the card.
You now get 1 terabyte (1000 gigabytes) of storage space for photos for free. And you can store full resolution photos and later download the full resolution. If you aren't looking to make your photos public, you can set the default for all of your uploads to be private.
I'm not sure if they will accept .raw files, if that is what you are looking for. (if raw files are still a thing )
edit: D'oh! I didn't notice someone else already mentioned Flickr.
jchef wrote:Flickr got a major upgrade about 2 months ago.
You now get 1 terabyte (1000 gigabytes) of storage space for photos for free. And you can store full resolution photos and later download the full resolution. If you aren't looking to make your photos public, you can set the default for all of your uploads to be private.
I'm not sure if they will accept .raw files, if that is what you are looking for. (if raw files are still a thing )
edit: D'oh! I didn't notice someone else already mentioned Flickr.
That's great, hadnt heard about the flicker upgrade. May be time for a migration back (I used to be on there but they didnt give as much space back then)
Nikon has their own storage site. Anyone can get a 2 gb account for free. If you own a Nikon camera you can sign up and then upgtrade to a 20GB account, which is also free for Nikon owners.
gatorman
I like Dropbox for the fact that you can share files and folders between people easily, and the interface is great. It's start with 2GB free but you can "earn" up to 16GB free by inviting others. If you come across anyone who could use Dropbox, send them an invite. Then you both get another 250MB free. I'm up to 7GB now.
For whatever it's worth..... I don't keep pictures or music on my computer's drives. All pictures (almost 10K between raw and jpegs) and music (600+ albums) are on a Raid mirrored 1TB/1TB drive. I backup from there on a monthly to quarterly basis to a 1TB single. I do a further backup a couple of times a year to another drive that lives in a safe. I also have a photo web site which has all my full size jpegs..... www.martindareff.com
As part of my backup* I copy photos to both my wifes laptop and mine. This won't handle the house burning down, but its a quick first step and it also makes recovery of accidental deletions easier, since I can easily and quickly search my local drive.
I use photobucket but will try flickr again now as well.
Does anyone know if it is possible to share just one set of photos with someone and not allow them to see all your other photos sets without making everything private?