ISO Photograph Storage Website

[Sandyj]

Do you have any recommendations on websites that host photographs. A colleague has recommended "flickr", and I signed up, but am not crazy about the way you have to upload photos.

I did a search in the forum to see if anyone has talked about this before, and I see GB mentioned in another post about how the internet has changed/affected your life, that he shares photographs via a website.

I have gmail, and with gmail you can download and use Picasa, and it looks pretty good. Uploading lots of photos at one time is really easy and fast.

Like my yen to make great roast potatoes, I want it all!
I want it to have:
- easy to upload photos (& more than one at a time)
- enable captioning and grouping
- doesn't sneak spyware onto my machine or anyone elses that views my photos (e.g. webshots)
- as few as possible distracting ads and pop-ups
- free is good - but I'm prepared to pay if the site was worth it
- provide a means of easily ordering prints (and competitive prices)
I consider it a bonus if:
- editing tools provided

So far, Picasa seems to have all of this, but I haven't gone through it thoroughly, and you do have to download some software on your machine to use it.

Does anyone have any recommendations? I'm just learning about all of this and would appreciate any comments & I know there are people here who already have the hang of all of this!

-Sandyj

 

[GB]

The site I use is called Fotki. I can not recommend it highly enough. I have tried probably about 30 photo sites and this one is by far the best! It does cost money (for a premium membership), but it is so worth the money. You can get a trial membership for free though. There are limitations for the trial of course, but it will at least give an idea if you want to pay the $50 annual fee.

they have multiple ways of uploading photos and I find it very easy. I upload a ton (hundreds every month) and it is pretty painless. Fotki hits every point on your wish list with the possible exception of the editing. It might have that, but I don't think it does. I use my own photo editing program so i have never looked for that. There are tons of other things you can do with Fotki though that you didn't ask about, like selling your photos if you want. That is just one example.

You can customize your account in so many ways and they are always adding more bells and whistles.


Get a trial account and give it a shot. Read through their FAQ file to see all the things you can do. Let me know if you have any questions as I have been using this site for years and am pretty familiar with it.

 

[Sandyj]

Many thanks for your reply and recommendation. I will try this out. Actually, right after I posted, I went back and clicked on your 'check out my photography here' link and was impressed by how your photographs were organized and captioned. Should have looked there first, huh? Your daughter is gorgeous! You and your wife must be in heaven!
One other question....since I am so new to digital photography - do you also print all or most of your photographs? As technology changes, will we have to "upgrade" our actual photograph files so that they can be read by an application? Is there a risk of losing these precious memories if the website goes down?
I have a photo editor on my machine that came with my Nikon, and I also have Microsoft's product - but I just haven't had time to play with either. I thought it might save time if I could do things like red-eye reduction right on the sight - it's not my biggest wish, though.
Thanks! Sandyj

 

[GB]

Thanks so much. Yes we are in heaven for sure. I never knew I could love someone this much! She is the best baby with the happiest disposition and just makes us smile all the time

I take so many pictures that I would have to take out a second mortgage if I printed all of my pictures. I do print a lot lot of them though. I also keep backups that I burn on CD and I have those in a fireproof safe. If my house was burning down and I could only save one non living thing, it would be my photos. I know your concern about technology changing and being unable to access your treasured files. I share that same concern. I am pretty confident that however the technology changes though, since digital photography has become so popular, there will be a way to always see this photos. At least that is my hope!

as far as losing everything if their website goes down, that is something I am concerned about as well. They did have a problem once and the site was down. I wrote to them and expressed that very fear. They told me they do have a backup of all the files in a different location just in case. That made me very happy to hear, but I still do not completely trust anyone except myself with something this important to me, so that is why I make CD backups (multiple ones in case the CD's get ruined. I also keep all of my photos on the hard drive on my computer as well. None of these methods are foolproof ways of ensuring my photos will survive, but I figure the more places I have them, the better the chances are.

I am pretty sure that there is no way to do red eye reduction on the site right now. They are very open to suggestions though and would probably look into adding that feature if enough people requested it. I would have a hard time believing that they have not heard that request before.

 

[ironchef]

Try this:

www.snapfish.com

 

[Sandyj]

I had a very quick look at snapfish, and will look more in depth once I get home. A question came to mind.....do you use IE at home?

I recently switched to the Firefox browser (it's faster and has (allegedly) fewer security holes) and went as far as removing the IE shortcuts from my desktop. Snapfish docs mention that you have to use IE if you want to utilize their editing feature. I'll check at home if I can use the website through Firefox.

Thanks for the information so far ! Sandyj

 

[GB]

I used Firefox as well. I will never go back to IE. If you don't already have this extension then you might want to load it. It lets you open pages in IE when needed so if you ever do get to a page that requires it then it is easy to use right from Firefox. IE View

I am not sure if snapfish has changed or not, but what I did not like about them was it required people to become members of their site in order to view your photos. Part of the registration was an email address and I still get emails from them even though I have told them not to email me. You can't just go to snapfish and view photos. You need to log in. That drove me crazy and I stopped looking at peoples photos who use it. Maybe they have changed since the last time I looked though.

 

[Sandyj]

Appreciating your information...

Yeah, so far so good with Firefox. I'm in IT - but in Oracle land, way in the back end with the dusty old data base. One of my colleagues recommended Firefox (& he's the smartest person I know), since at home I have multiple users on our XP machine, and what with the firewall on the machine, the McAffee anti-virus software and firewall, and the security on the network, we are sloooooooooow and we still were experiencing spyware & the occasional virus. Firefox has improved some of that. I haven't allowed my youngest daughter to use a computer to go online from her bedroom (keep her in eye view) & have been teaching my mom to do email, hence the multiple users on the computer in the family room. Thanks for the link to for IE.
I read with interest your comments on Snapfish - this is exactly the kind of information I was looking for. Thanks.

 

[ironchef]

I use IE because from what I've seen, it's more compatible with sites, plug-ins, HTML codes, etc. To be fair I haven't really used Firefox that much, but just from what I have seen and heard.

 

[Sandyj]

Ironchef, somehow I'm thinking you're a gamer? If so, then maybe IE is better for accessing gaming websites. On the other hand, what do I know! Zilch. Firefox is working out okay for us - we haven't had any trouble accessing any of the websites we normally use, but we're probably not asking it to work all that hard. In case we need IE, I didn't delete it completely, and GB's link I think will make IE easier to retrieve should we ever need to call on it. Sandy

 

[GB]

I still use IE for work. For some things IE is still needed, but for most things I have not had any trouble with Firefox and have found my browsing experiences so much better. There are so many great add ons for Firefox and the virus writers do not target it (yet). Since I have been using it (prob close to a year now) I have had maybe 6 spyware programs install on my system. Before that I has hundreds upon hundreds and every time I cleared those out more would just take their place.

That extension I sent you Sandyj is great. One of the things it lets you do is set it up so that if there is a site you use that you know you will always need to open in IE then you can tell it that and it will do it automatically. Otherwise you just go to a site and if you find it does not work then you right click and select open in IE and it will launch a new IE window with that URL.