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There are lots of great and free ways to store your photos. I keep mine on my computer using Google’s Picasa. http://picasa.google.com/ I have found it very easy to use. You can also upload your pictures online where you will find 1 GB available. That’s enough to store thousands of pictures of those darling grandchildren, your wonderful children, and your sweet elderly relatives.
When you do upload your pictures to Picasa online you have your choice to set it up for anyone to see, no one to see, or certain specified people to see. I hate emailing more than a couple of pictures at a time because, depending on the resolution, the files can be too large to email properly. With Picasa, I just upload as many as I want into a protected account. I send the site and logon information to the people I want to allow in, and they can view the pictures easily at their leisure and even download them to their own computers. They have a nice basic information manual at http://picasa.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=93183 .
There are other online storage sites as well, including Yahoo’s Flickr, Smugmug, and Shutterfly. You can find them easily at:
http://www.flickr.com/ Their free account limits the amount of photos you can see at one time to the 200 most recent and limits how many pictures you can upload monthly. For personal use, most people will probably find they don’t exceed those limits.
www.shutterfly.com I like their site and have used them to make a photo book as a gift (that article is coming soon.). They do offer to store as many pictures as you like with no limits but you can can’t download them in high resolution so to me it isn’t worth using them as a storage site. One thing I do love about this site. They work with Target and you can upload pictures to them, order copies of prints, and choose to pick up the pictures at Target.
www.smugmug.com This site is not free. It offers three levels of membership, with the first starting at $39.95. It is an excellent site and I know several people who use it extensively. I have assisted one friend in working with photos he stores there for his business and found using it to be quite simple. Even with the least expensive option, you get unlimited storage. They also have an excellent staff who answer email questions quickly and knowledgeably.
Do you have a favorite site not listed here? We’d love to hear about it. Leave the information in the comments below or write to Kaye@SandwichINK.com .
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