internet photo storage

[markpierce]

Is their an honest internet storage site? Recently, the most commonly used sites have changed their policies to require hundreds-of-dollars in annual fees to share one's photos with others and also require that one provide credit card data even to access one's account/portfolio. Questionable business ethics to me. But what is the solution? Effectively, those sites have stolen over a decade's of photos from me.

 

[gaston]

Google Photos ? Flickr ? iCloud I use all 3 cost is minimal

 

[markpierce]

TF won't even allow the reposting of photobucket photos in previous posts. Obviously, photobucket has claimed total ownership of my photographs. (Not unlike other sites.) They are claiming exclusive rights, and I'm, the creator, treated as a third party.

Why is TF a party to this?

 

[Giggitoni]

Store all your photos on an external hard drive. Better yet, store them on two drives. Keep one in a safe place. No need for a “photo service”. When you want to attach a photo to a thread, grab one from your potable hard drive.

 

[john61ct]

Yes you must own the hardware that stores at least your master archive and rolling backups - completely separate hardware at least one backup device stored offsite.

Rent storage somewhere for that last OK, but not shared and certainly not cheap if you want long-term security.

Always be ready for any hosting or cloud service to go bankrupt, get hacked, disappear overnight.

That said, I share via links to Imgur galleries. But treat that as an ephermal sharing resource, not canonical storage.

 

[Irish Rover]

I use Flickr. It's free, seems OK or am I just being naive?

 

[Bay Pelican]

First I have heard of this issue. Are there problems using Dropbox or Amazon Drive?

 

[john61ct]

First I have heard of this issue. Are there problems using Dropbox or Amazon Drive?

Fewer with such well-established expensive vendors, but I would trust no single vendor with both my master archive and my rolling backups.

One each between the two maybe.

But nothing beats owning the hardware locally.

If you get past a few hundred GB how do you get it all downloaded in a reasonable timeframe when they discontinue?

Nothing lasts forever.

 

[menzies]

I have had my own domain for over a decade. Registration is around $15 a year. I then use InMotion to host my site, probably around $100 per year.
I run two web sites off it, my personal AtAnchor.com, and our yacht club site that I run. I choose InMotion because they allow unlimited data.
I have 5TB of local external storage, with the best photos on the sites.

 

[Lou_tribal]

Use google drive and microsoft one drive accounts. First 15Gb are free. Should you need more, open another account under a different email and you get 15Gb more.

L

 

[MurrayM]

Store all your photos on an external hard drive. Better yet, store them on two drives. Keep one in a safe place. No need for a “photo service”. When you want to attach a photo to a thread, grab one from your potable hard drive.

We've been looking at these...

5C

https://www.synology.com/en-global/products/DS718+

...for when I make the transition from using 4x5 B&W film for selenium toned silver paper enlargements to using mainly digital RAW Lightroom/Photoshop/luminosity mask based processes to make digitally printed negatives for platinum/palladium contact printing.

Any other suggestions greatly appreciated!

 

[john61ct]

Drobo is a lot more flexible and very user friendly

 

[BandB]

Whatever you use among the suggestions here, keep a copy stored locally. You're blaming all these sites when you're the one who failed to keep a local copy. Having never used and not knowing the site you used, couldn't you pay the fee for a month or so and then download copies of them all on to your hard drive? Or are they stamped permanently with the site name.

You always stood the risk of the site going out of business and just disappearing. Don't ever trust any third party to the only copy of something of yours. If you go the route of Seavee and have your own domain, still maintain a local copy of everything. You can get enormous flash drives now. External hard drives. Anything. I feel horrible for your loss. Just don't let it happen again with anyone.

 

[Bay Pelican]

20 years of cruising has taught me to have a backup. Thus i have three storage means for my photos. External hard drive on my desk. External hard drive in a fire resistant box and Dropbox and Amazon drive.

Frankly I just update the stored hard drive a couple of times a year. Dropbox is automatic and Amazon Drive is also updated just a couple of times a year.

 

[CaptTom]

I'm very disappointed in Google Photos. I had a Picasaweb account, but Google abandoned that and switched all the users over to their Photos offering.

It's crap. Picasaweb allowed you to share your entire gallery. Anyone just had to type in your ID after the picasaweb URL, or go to that one permanent link, and they'd see all the albums you'd marked "public."

Google Photos doesn't work this way. It does allow you to a generate long, cryptic URL for each album or photo. You can share those by sending around e-mails or texts that people can click on. But you need to do this for each new album (or photo) you want to share. Your friends and family can't just keep one bookmark and go back to it when they want to see what's new.

What Google really wants is to have everyone you know sign up for their social media "experience" and share photos that way. No thanks.

 

[Conrad]

I'm very disappointed in Google Photos. I had a Picasaweb account, but Google abandoned that and switched all the users over to their Photos offering.

It's crap. Picasaweb allowed you to share your entire gallery. Anyone just had to type in your ID after the picasaweb URL, or go to that one permanent link, and they'd see all the albums you'd marked "public."

Google Photos doesn't work this way. It does allow you to a generate long, cryptic URL for each album or photo. You can share those by sending around e-mails or texts that people can click on. But you need to do this for each new album (or photo) you want to share. Your friends and family can't just keep one bookmark and go back to it when they want to see what's new.

What Google really wants is to have everyone you know sign up for their social media "experience" and share photos that way. No thanks.

Exactly my experience as well. Picasa was a great storage/management/sharing tool that google turned into a lumbering piece of garbage.

 

[Lou_tribal]

You can put your pics directly in google drive in a folder and share the folder to whoever you want, anything you would add in it will be shared. Order your photos in folders like you would do on your local disk and you are done. No need to share album by album, and if feel the need to share only one album share just its folder, simple as it is.

L

 

[twistedtree]

TF won't even allow the reposting of photobucket photos in previous posts. Obviously, photobucket has claimed total ownership of my photographs. (Not unlike other sites.) They are claiming exclusive rights, and I'm, the creator, treated as a third party.

Why is TF a party to this?

What rights exactly are they claiming? Any? Or are they just making you pay to access the stored data, which still sucks. If they are actually claiming rights to your copyright material, then it should be in the use agreement that you accepted when signing up for the service. If as part of signing up, you inadvertently turned over rights to them, that's pretty evil, and highlights the importance of reading those user agreements.

 

[twistedtree]

Here are extracts from Photobucket's Terms of Use. It's pretty nasty. Yes, you retain ownership, but you grant them rights to any images that you make as "public" and they can then use them in any way they want. And they can reprocess or otherwise manipulate your images, including placing banners on them, etc.

Bottom line is that they are the last palce where you want to store your pictures because what you put in isn't necessarily (unlikely in fact) to be what you pull out.

Here are the text excerpts:

You retain all your rights to any Content you submit, upload or display on or while using Photobucket. This means that you own all the Content you post and are responsible for its settings:

• You can mark any Content you upload as "private." Content marked "private" will not show up in public search results on the Site and only Users you have given access will be able view the Content either in your album or in search results.

• When you make your Content public, you grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, non-revocable, right and license to copy, sell, convey, distribute, stream, post, publicly display (e.g. post it elsewhere), reproduce and create derivative works from it (meaning things based on it), whether in print or any kind of electronic version that exists now or is later developed, for any purpose, including a commercial purpose with the right to sublicense such rights to others.
• By making your content public, you are also giving other Members on Photobucket the right to copy, distribute, publicly perform, publicly display, reproduce and create derivative works from it via the Site, third party websites or applications (for example, via services allowing Members to order prints of Content or t-shirts and similar items containing Content, and via social media websites), provided such use is not for a commercial purpose.
• Photobucket may manipulate your Content to offer the Photobucket Services (including transcoding and/or reformatting Content) to allow its use throughout the Photobucket Services.
• Photobucket has the right to place advertising, promotions, notifications or identifiers, banners and watermarks on or near your Content, and how and what are up to us.

 

[Lou_tribal]

Here are extracts from Photobucket's Terms of Use. It's pretty nasty. Yes, you retain ownership, but you grant them rights to any images that you make as "public" and they can then use them in any way they want. And they can reprocess or otherwise manipulate your images, including placing banners on them, etc.]

This is the case in many “social” ( if there is anything social there) media like facebouc and there are some historical cases where people found out their pics were use in an ad or things like this without any agreement.

Welcome to our wonderful new (virtual) world

L

 

[twistedtree]

This is the case in many “social” ( if there is anything social there) media like facebouc and there are some historical cases where people found out their pics were use in an ad or things like this without any agreement.

Welcome to our wonderful new (virtual) world

L

Right, and everyone seems happy to turn everything over to these companies. No thanks.

 

[BandB]

Right, and everyone seems happy to turn everything over to these companies. No thanks.

And people seem to think things are going to remain free. I don't trust that anything will remain free. I don't provide free services or products.

 

[john61ct]

If you're not paying, then *you* are the product.

 

[markpierce]

Photobucket now demands credit-card data to access one's account as well as a $300 annual fee to share one's photos. But then, TF won't allow posting photos coming from photobucket. WHY IS THAT? So even if I pay the ransom, I can't post here. Definitely appears that any photos posted on photobucket and other similar sites claim ownership of the photographs.

Never been successful posting photos from my hard drive onto TF.

Anyone note the significant drop in photos posted on TF?

 

[markpierce]

And people seem to think things are going to remain free. I don't trust that anything will remain free. I don't provide free services or products.

They provided photographic services for a fee such as providing prints. Don't recall they said access to one's own photos would be subject to a fee sometime in the future.

 

[john61ct]

Just post to Imgur, can be anonymous. Lots of helper apps.

Then just post a link

 

[BandB]

Never been successful posting photos from my hard drive onto TF.

It's very easy to post photos from your hard drive to TF. You choose the files and upload them. Then you click on them to add them to the post.

 

[gaston]

It's very easy to post photos from your hard drive to TF. You choose the files and upload them. Then you click on them to add them to the post.

 

[BandB]

How to recover your lost Photobucket images attn Birdman666 - Parrot Forum - Parrot Owner's Community

I don't know if you've tried either of these methods or not, but both were posted as means to recover your photos.

 

[CMS]

TF won't allow posting photos coming from photobucket. WHY IS THAT?

Why? Probably because Photobucket not only F'd all their customers but they literally broke the internet when the dropped 3rd party hot linking. I think it is a good thing that sites no longer allow any hot linking from P-Bucket as they are about as dishonest a company as exists. They lured all the mice into the trap and when it was chock full, slammed the door on them.

Nearly every web forum on the net, blog, eBay etc. etc.. all suffered horrible disrepair when P-Bucket F'd their customers. Just two days ago I was looking for info on a Honda snowblower and found what was once an excellent post with all the info I needed. Unfortunately all the important stuff, the photos, were gone and replaced with the Photobucket ransom logo.. Photobuckets' ransom & heist of your personal photos, with zero advanced warning, will haunt the internet for years to come.