With the advent of digital photography, the need for photo storage space is increasing exponentially. Lately, I’m taking a lot of pictures that are church related and/or blog related and I need a good solution for storing and sharing photos. There are 3 options, the way I see it and my solution might be a combination.
I have been a fan of Flickr for quite some time and have recently reached my free limit, apparently. Once you surpass 200 pics on Flickr, they hold the oldest pics hostage until you either remove some pics or pay the price for the Pro package. Picasa gives you about a gig of space and depending on the format of pic you are saving, it may be the better free value.
It’s just that I have never gotten a warm fuzzy from Picasa, it used to seem clunky to me. For one thing, it seemed just like a private photo album, not public and no way to choose. Either I missed something or they’ve added more functionality because it now seems more robust. Mary has been using Picasa and likes it.
With Flickr holding my pics hostage, I have jumped over to Picasa to take it for a test drive and I am actually impressed. I like the integration of Picasa desktop and the Picasa site, along with the ability to make pics public or private.
At the moment, the appeal of Picasa is growing, however, it seems that Flickr offers a better upgrade package. Here’s the breakdown:
Flickr
- Unlimited storage
- Unlimited uploads
- Unlimited bandwidth
- Unlimited sets
- Permanent archiving of high resolution original images
- Ad free browsing and sharing
1 year for $24.95
Picasa
- 12 months of hassle-free uploading and sharing
No complicated monthly bandwidth limits to keep track of.
7gb $25
26gb $100
101gb $300
251gb $500
Picasa is the same deal except there’s a storage limit. I guess Flickr assumes you are not going to upload 251gb of photos for their price.
Buy my own storage
MicroCenter has a Western Digital 400gb hard drive on sale right now for $89 and I’m in Kansas City right now, so I pay once and plenty of storage. That’s good and bad, good for the one time cost, bad because then I’m responsible for backing up 400gb of data. The big question, will that big drive last 4 years to recoup the cost of 4 years of Flickr or Picasa?
For now, I’m good with Picasa for free, but I think the day will come when I need to pay the price unless there is a better alternative. My church is going to need more space for storage and really, either Picasa or Flickr gives a good value for $25 annually.
What does your church use for photo storage?
I’ve always viewed Flickr (and other online imaging sites) as “galleries” to share a select few images, rather than an online hard drive at which to dump everything. If you are looking for an online (offsite) backup solution, you might consider something like MozyPro. But if you wanted the function of a backup solution with the form of a gallery then I would stick with Flickr all day long. That annual fee is nominal compared to the brilliant service.
As far as NCC goes, I bet you could guess what we use since it is my call.
Awesome post! This is exactly what we are working on right now. We are trying to get away from using a webdesign/hosting service and into something we control, and would save us money. So far I am checking out the free services to get a feel for them. I like Flickr for it’s options, but you can only make 4 albums without without upgrading. That’s a bummer if you want to make a lot albums for different events or ministries even though you don’t have a lot of pics. Of course, we would go the fee route when we get serious, but for now,,, I like Picasa because it’s a Google app and I am loving what they are doing, and their embedded slide show looks better than Flickr, IMHO.
Thanks for putting the hard drive option into perspective too, I had been kicking that idea around also, but the though of having a cheap hard drive poop the bed with all our files is terrifying.
Thanks for posting on this!
David, I agree, the public gallery of flickr or picasa is for a select few, not every pic snapped. In today’s digital world, a single event translates to potentially hundreds of photos per camera! For my blog, I’m trying to create a gallery of photos relevant to things I am doing and I see a similar application for my church. Although, there’s potentially some overlap and I am slowly having more input in all things tech within my church. I have heard of MozyPro but never looked into it, probably need to do that.
Wayne, Like you, I am very much into Google apps, so that kind of pulls me that way.
David,
I went through this same thought process over a year ago. Here’s what I decided to do for our church:
1) We use Flickr to store all the photos that are taken for events at the church. We paid the $25 and didn’t blink an eye about it. No storage limit, no bandwidth limit, accessibility to the photos for everyone, tags, sets and collections make it easy to find the photos.
2) We purchased a 400g hard drive just for photos. I back up our “Photos” folder on one of our servers with this drive periodically.
3) We still store photos on one of our servers. It’s fast and accessible for everyone.
There are some GREAT applications that are free for Flickr to help you create slide shows on your web site. These apps help to display only the photos that you want shown instead of displaying every single photo that was taken at an event.
Here’s a link to view some of the hundreds of Flickr apps, http://mentalaxis.com/words/flickr-tools/. Go here to see how the slide show app looks on our church web site: http://www.hhbc.com/p/9168/Default.aspx. The app I used for this slide show is listed on this site: http://sexyredheadednuns.org/?category=Photos&post=FlickrSlideshowsRedux. Don’t let the name scare you away. It’s really a great app that lets you display any photos you desire either by the set or by a tag in your Flickr account.
I’m a huge fan of Google, just read some of my posts on my blog and you’ll quickly figure that out. But, imho Flickr is the best online storage option.
smugmug.com
Any, unlike the other online photo services, they store the original picture without compression and resizing.
Currently we host our own gallery with Gallery2. It’s OSS, so the cost is nill. Only disadvantage would be the space is shared with our website, but so far that hasn’t been a problem. We always have more space on there than our site needs.
Jeff, Thanks so much for the mentalaxis link, those apps are crazy good! I’ve got to clear my schedule now to play with them!