Store Digital Photographs Online
By Bruce A. Love
Digital photography has become so easy and inexpensive that many users are now taking hundreds or thousands of pictures every year! With so many images, reliable storage for these graphic treasures becomes an important consideration! Thumb drives, CD-ROMs, DVDs and even hard drives can hold just so much, and we must face the fact that they all will fail us eventually. Do you really want to keep your family picture albums and other irreplaceable photographs someplace that can vanish overnight?
Many people have discovered online photo hosting services for their digital pictures. Companies such as Kodak Gallery (www.kodakgallery.com), Flickr (www.flickr.com), and Shutterfly (www.shutterfly.com) offer many features, options, and tools that will make photograph storing, sharing, and editing easier than ever. Many of the services are free!
Once you opened an online account and uploaded your photos to your own gallery page, you will be able to add captions and titles and set up slide shows so that friends and family anywhere around the world can view your pictures. Kodak Gallery, typical of these photo hosting sites, allows you to organize your photos in secure virtual albums for easy sharing. These albums will let you, your friends, and family quickly find photos sorted by date or name, and search by keywords.
The editing tools provided by these services allow users to crop, rotate, and remove red-eye to enhance your pictures. You can even tint and add artistic effects and borders. Flickr and Shutterfly are free to use, however, each have premium services and products that you may opt to pay for. Shutterfly offers unlimited photo storage capability, while the free plan that Flickr offers limits the storage space to 100 MB. Kodak Gallery has unlimited storage, but requires users to make at least one purchase per year. Purchases may include prints, posters, books, cards, calendars or photos printed on coffee mugs. The requirement of one purchase per year is really quite reasonable.
If you choose to purchase prints from Kodak Gallery you can either have the photos on Kodak paper mailed to your home or shipped to a store near you. I counted 6 stores in the greater Altoona Area that work with Kodak Gallery to give you convenient pick-up options.
This week, I started my own Flickr account. I like the intuitive and flexible interface and the ability to easily share photographs with others. I also like the ability to keep some albums and pictures private, and the multiple viewing options that let visitors view images as reduced size (thumbnails) for quick scanning, an intermediate size for greater detail, or full size for maximum resolution. Visitors are allowed to copy images from your online gallery to and print images that they like at home. If I find that I am testing the free space limits of Flickr, I can always check out the competition.
Digital photography offers many advantages over film-based photography. It’s relatively inexpensive, and images are quick and easy to share, edit, and print. Also, photographs taken with digital cameras now boast resolutions that rival photographs produced by the most expensive film cameras. With photo hosting services, storing thousands of photos is no longer a problem.
