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Ask HN: What's the current least bad solution for storing personal photos?
I was all ready to switch all my photos to Everpix. But after its well-publicized shut down, I'm now a little hesitant to trust that kind of service.
Dropbox seems like they're making a play for photo storage, but I'm not sure they're quite there yet. And I guess there's also services like Google Drive or iCloud, but these always seemed opaque and poorly designed to me.
Anyway, I'm curious to know what people use. I've got 50GB of photos sitting on my hard drive and I need to do something about it!
- skidoo 12y agoI have been using MEGA since its launch, and have been quite happy with the service. https://mega.co.nz/#fm https://mega.co.nz/#fm
- mkal_tsr 12y agoPre-encrypt -> Amazon S3. Easy-peasy.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- tonteldoos 12y agoDo you need them online for any particular reason? At 50GB, I'm assuming it's all your raw camera data, so obviously not all of it needs to be shared with friends? If so, buy yourself a small NAS with two 500GB or 1TB drives in it (it'll cost you less than $200), and configure them as RAID-0. This will give you redundancy (not backup), and availability on your network. Get another 500GB or 1TB portable drive, and backup your NAS to that once a week, or once a month, depending on how often you add photos. Ideally store this drive offsite, or in a safe or similar, because this is your backup drive. Most NAS drives will also allow you to share the content, but due to security concerns I would probably not recommend that. If you need access to them away from home, setup a machine with SSH access to your home network, and access the drive that way via VPN (although this is a completely different topic). Generally, with technology being cheap, I'm anti storing any valuable personal data in the cloud. If you do need or want to share some of the photos, find a service that allows that (there are plenty), but definitely don't use it as your primary storage or backup service. Note that the above is pretty much my setup, and it's been serving me well for a few years now (with a similar amount/size of photos).
- joeclark77 12y agoDropbox just upped the "Pro" account from 100GB to 1000GB. That's more than enough to store all the pictures you'll take in the next few decades. The benefit of something like Dropbox or its various copycats is that the file is stored on each of your computers as well as being stored in the cloud. So you really aren't putting all your eggs in one basket either locally or remotely. But you should also curate and print out some of your photos. This was discussed on HN just a couple of weeks ago: (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8129457 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8129457). The linked article (http://commandcenter.blogspot.com/2014/08/prints.html http://commandcenter.blogspot.com/2014/08/prints.html) reminds us that we're living in a "digital dark age" that's likely to leave few traces in history. Furthermore, even if your great-grandchildren could read the photo files you store today, do you really expect them to look at all of them?
- BrindsleyQuives 12y agoFlickr now give you 50GB storage for free. You can set your prefs to make all your uploaded photos visible only to yourself. So it's a bit of a no-brainer to use as an additional backup (but obviously not your sole backup)
- orky56 12y agoFlickr is actually not a bad option. It's been around the longest and Yahoo is actually finally putting some weight behind it. Compared to general file storage services like Dropbox, Flickr offers 1 TB of space. You don't have to worry about hitting the ceiling on limits. Also, although many people associate Flickr with professional & public photos, it is very easy to make pictures private by default.
- naskwo 12y agoUse https://www.famipix.com https://www.famipix.com Disclaimer: I founded this site in 2005, and I still run it today. You can also order very high quality prints, for archival backups.