The worst place to store photos is....

Without a doubt, the worst way to store your photos online is Facebook!  That is right, the one place that makes it easiest for you to share them with your friends is also the worst place to keep them.  No, I am not drunk or off my rocker.  It is true, if you value your photos as most people do, only keep a copy of them on Facebook.  


If you are anything like me, you too get wildly annoyed by having to take the same picture 15 times with each person's different camera.  In today's world of digital photography, how could that be?  Sure I can see why this was necessary when it cost $$$ to reproduce copies and took a very concerted effort to meetup or mail them as a means of sharing.  


Here is where Facebook starts to fill the gap.  The tagging feature allows people to "get a copy" of the photo.  This is great as it does allow you a chance to see and "get" the photos you want from other people's cameras.  It has infinite storage, it is free, and as long as you are friends with or want to be friends with all the people at the event, you stand a better than good opportunity to at least see the pictures in your newsfeed or be tagged in them.  

What most people don't know and Facebook doesn't really want them to know, it is very difficult to get your pictures out of Facebook.  What if you want to throw them on a USB drive and run down to Walgreens to get them printed for a collage or other project.  Nope, not going to be easy with Facebook.  What if you had a social identity disaster and needed to change accounts...next to impossible to extract all of your photos from Facebook to your computer.  They will do it, but takes weeks and by most accounts is always incomplete and doesn't include any pictures that you didn't own but were tagged in.  This is all bad news


So, what is the answer?  Where is the BEST place to store your photos online?  The good news is there are plenty of places that make good sense on what to do with your photos.  First lets look at the features that most users might find nice to have when considering working with their pics.  

• Universal Access (Desktop, Laptop, Tablet, Phone)
• Control of photos (ability to add/delete/move with ease)
• Photo processing (instagram type features, crop, resize, etc)
• Printing (either locally or through an online service)
• Sharing (Facebook, Twitter, individuals or Groups)

I am sure there are others, but this encompasses many of the highly desired photo features.  There are a number of ways that satisfy a number of these requirements.  It is hard to go wrong with the standard online drive services like www.skydrive.com, drive.google.com, or www.dropbox.com.  They allow you complete control over your files as well as some sharing capabilities.  They aren't designed specifically for photos, though Skydrive without a doubt has the most sophisticated photo specific abilities.   

To look at photo specific services, you would want to check out Google's picasaweb.google.com,Yahoo's www.flickr.com, www.photobucket.com, www.shutterfly.com.  These sites offer the most photo specific tools.  Google's Picasa has a software that you can download to your computer to help you with sharing/organizing/modifying your pictures.  It is a great little manager, but definitely not entirely necessary.  Flickr is a favorite with most high end photographers due to their ability to control the rights of their photos and even be some a marketplace for their work.

Here at Inverted Networks, not surprisingly we utilize Google Picasa.  It has some very interesting features that allow for collaborating online photo albums.  We can all contribute to specific albums simply by email the photos to a unique contact in our phone.  The RSS feature allows us to connect and share with LCD Picture frames to those that aren't all that technologically savvy.  Through the data liberation service at Google, we can extract our data at our wish.  

There are plenty of good ways to protect the safety of your photos, allow you to share them with anyone with an email address (without having to let them into your Facebook world) as well as several other photo-centric features.  If you have any other services we missed here, please feel free to let us know.