Tong Family

“About”:http://freebies.about.com/cs/digphotostorage/ and also google:”photo storage”.The gold old days of the web are back, now there are literally dozens of sites that will let you store your photos for free on the web and the amount of storage is unbelievable. About has a good list to start with, but here are some reviews of the better places. I’m looking for somewhere that lets you put 3GB plus of photos up there. Right now Adrian, Steve and I share 1GB that we use for everything for $20/month. Here are some of the top hits from a query on photo storage. (FYI the query on A9.com and google.com are very different, I’ve used google for this analysis) and here they are in order of what I liked:

* “imagestation”:http://imagestation.com. This is run by Sony. You get unlimited storage with unlimited sizes. Quite fast on upload as well but minimum set of features when you get there.
* “Webshots”:http://webshots. My buddy Peter uses these guys, not clear on how they work quite yet.

These sites are free but had one problem or another

* “GJPix”:http://gallery.greatestjournal.com. This site comes up with a google:”photo hosting” search. It looks like a place where there aren’t many limits except for a 4MB limit per picture which is pretty Ok except for my largest photos. Other problem is there is no auto uploader, it does one photo at a time.
* “Shutterfly”:http://shutterfly.com. Steve has been using these guys for years. Personally I’ve found the site in years past slow and right
now when I tried it again, the Firefox uploader hangs Firefox, so that’s a negative.
* “Kodakgallery”:http://kodakgallery.com. This is the old ofoto site. Has unlimited hosting. Like Shutterfly, I’ve used it in the past. The site looks good, but the uploader just crashed and you can’t get the original images back down, they just go up and you can see them on the web and buy prints, but can’t download the images.

These sites are free with limitations of all sorts. I ranked in order of what makes sense:

*”Photobucket”:http://photobucket.com. These folks just got a big venture round and do the photo backend for lots of sites. You get 1GB for free and up to 10GB per month of bandwidth to up and download and they downres your photos to 1MB. So not really great but OK if you have a low resolution camera.
* “Club Photo”:http://clubphoto.com. Unlimited free storage but they delete your albums not used in 90 days
* “dotPhoto”:http://dotPhoto.com. They have unlimited storage but you have to use their service to order things

Finally here are site that cost money on google pagerank order. Personally, I think these are the ones to get because the cost is very nominal and they have the most functionality. In order of features. I’ll report later on how stable and reliable they are:

* “fotki.com”:http://fotki.com. This is a social network and photo sharing system. You can email and MMS to magic email address to send it up there. It has a Java applet that is very nice that lets you startup loading. It also has tagging and nice sharing features plus a nice browse. It is $30/year annually for unlimited storage. They are not very upfront about this. The site limits you to 50-MB if you don’t pay but puts in you a trial, so you can upload lots of stuff and then discover you have to pay $30 otherwise it is gone. Not super friendly, but not that much money either. Better than flickr in that there is a 14 day trial before they blow you out.
* “Flickr”:http://flickr.com. The first one I ever really used. Their restriction is a little strange. There is no limit on what is stored, but there is 20MB/month limit on what you can upload. If you pay $25/year, then it becomes a 2GB monthly upload limit with no limit on storage. That’s actually not a bad deal as 2GB is probably about 500 high resolution photos per month. There is also a desktop based< uploader and you can send your camera phone photos to it via a third party application. Works only for Symbian phones. Since they are now owned by yahoo, I presume their quality would be high.
* “Photosite”:http://photosite.com. This is another social networking plus photos site with 100 free photos, for $3/month, you get unlimited storage.
* “pixagogo”:http://pixagogo.com. It is $5/month with unlmited photos and no I haven’t tried it, at $60/year, it is lots more than fotki.