Cloud Storage Advice

Discussion in 'Photography Pad' started by Juliestcyr, Jul 27, 2016.

  1. Juliestcyr

    Juliestcyr Grammar nerd and proud of it

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    Looking for some advice:

    My husband's grandmother just moved into a nursing home, and we have become the caretakers of 100s of family photos, some of which are from the 1800s. My husband's grandfather was also an amateur photographer who won several awards, had his photos published in the paper/ hung in local galleries. So some of the photos we want to save are much larger than regular photos, and we want to save them at a higher resolution.

    We want to go with cloud storage so we can share these pictures easily and cheaply with relatives all across Canada, as well as Costa Rica and Israel. I want to be able to organize them in a way that some of the further relations will know, "Oh, I'm interested in the photos of my great-grandparents, but don't really need family snaps of my 2nd cousins."

    Any experience with DropBox or other cloud storage options? Anyone else undertaken a project like this?
     
    ForeverJoy likes this.
  2. bestcee

    bestcee In love with places I've never been to

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    First - so cool that you have some really old photos!!! That's so awesome!

    I use Dropbox all the time to share photos often. In fact, we used it after a Scrap retreat. Everyone uploaded their photos into a master shared folder under their name. So the folder structure was:
    Scrap Retreat
    - Brittany
    - Cheryl
    - Courtney
    - Kristin
    We gave everyone a month to grab the photos, as which point, we deleted them all because Dropbox takes up space.

    For my family, I have a shared folder with my brother, a different one with my mom, and a different one with mom in law. Unless you choose the business option, anything you put in the folder counts against both participants dropbox storage. My brother was just here visiting, so I'm adding photos to our shared dropbox that I took. He'll go in and "download" what he wants. Really, what he does is pull the photos from the folder to his computer. Because I put copies of the photos in there, this is ok. If you're relatives don't understand the idea of copying, not moving from the Dropbox folder, it will be a mess for you. Relative A will pull the photo, and Relative B won't be able to because the photo will be gone.

    Perhaps Flickr would be easier? You can set up Flickr so everything is private, and only viewable by family that you have accepted as family (super easy with an email). And you can have the option of downloading a full size photo. It comes with free 1 TB storage? And you can create albums on it, and collections.

    Or maybe create a private family blog and post them on it? Each post could have a preview of the photo, and you could use Dropbox to create a download link,for anyone that wants it, so that no one is moving anything out of the Dropbox folder but you? You could also tag the photos with family names, keeping it organized?
     
    keepscrappin likes this.
  3. jenn mccabe

    jenn mccabe She's OUR sunshine!

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    I've used Shutterfly for things like this. I had my own account and then other separate accounts for sharing photos EXAMPLE: my side of the family, different sports teams, after school activities. Anything that involved sharing photos, I'd create a new account and keep it private and invite the participants via email ... it allows others to upload photos and create albums too if they want. Not sure how easy it is to download multiple photos at a time ... so if you know everyone's main objective is grabbing a lot of photos at once, you'd have to look into that aspect.
     
  4. PLM

    PLM I know there's something in the wake of your smile

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    I would also go for the Dropbox option, in my experience that worked the best.
     
  5. michelepixels

    michelepixels A pun is not fully matured until it is full groan.

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    Like Jenn suggested, Shutterfly would be a good free solution. I created a few Share Sites with them several years ago and it was easy enough.

    But I recommend Smugmug. For as low as $40/year you can back up and share an infinite number of photos and videos, organized an any way you like, in a beautiful way. Professional photographers use Smugmug, but many hobbyists do too, because it's a family-owned company with fabulous customer service, where we can trust our photos are being kept safe, and it's easy for us to create custom designed websites. You choose the level of privacy of each gallery. I have ALL of my photos and scrapbook pages backed up at my Smugmug site. But only a few family members can see all of them. If you visit you will see only the galleries I've made public.

    I've used Dropbox too, just to share a few files, and my husband uses it a lot, but Smugmug is better if you're going for something visually appealing and a long term back up plan. I've been with them since 2008 and can imagine being with them forever.
     
    enjoyyourpix and keepscrappin like this.
  6. Juliestcyr

    Juliestcyr Grammar nerd and proud of it

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    Anybody use a LaCie CloudBox? It's a networked storage device. Photos could be shared with anyone on our network, and they have a web application that allows you to share with friends and family who are not on your home network. A 4TB drive is about $160 US at Amazon.
     
  7. gonewiththewind

    gonewiththewind I choose joy.

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    I haven't heard of LaCie CloudBox!

    For photo sharing, I generally upload those photos to Walgreens, where most of my family chooses to print. It makes it easy for them to download the ones they want on their computer, and of course, super easy for them to go ahead and print. The site is easy to navigate, even for older relatives, so that's definitely a plus.

    I use DropBox all the time for quick transfers. I use it to transfer photos from my mobile device to my computer. I use it to share photos with my husband and daughter only. I also use it for my design business, but again, it's basically for quick file sharing and not really a storage option.

    I use Backblaze as my backup service.

    I will second the recommendation for Flickr as well. 1 TB of space is quite a bit for free. I did try to share a folder on Flickr and I think my family members are tech impaired. It should have been something easy, but for some reason, it was a hassle. So I haven't tried it for sharing again. Perhaps your family would be more tech savvy. LOL
     
    keepscrappin likes this.
  8. bestcee

    bestcee In love with places I've never been to

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    I haven't heard of it before, but I'm wondering what the difference is between it, other EHD's with NAS setup, or a regular EHD with their cloud service?
     

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