Incorrect answer #1… The hard drive of my PC.

Go out and Google for "hard drive crash" and you will quickly learn that it's not "will my hard drive crash", but "when will my hard drive crash". Sit back for a moment and imagine that you hear a god-awful noise coming from inside your computer. What's your first thought? Where's the cat?  Or "Oh &%$#&%!"… my Bookmarks… my Quicken files… my mp3 collection… MY PHOTOS OF JOHNNY/JANEY BEING BORN?!??!? Pretty bad, huh? What do you tell your significant other, the one you convinced to let you upgrade to a DVD-Burner on your new Dell, just so that you could make backups? When was the last time you created a backup, one week after you got the computer? I don't know anyone that religiously makes backups to CD/DVD either. So what can you do? Read on…

Incorrect answer #2… ofoto.com, yahoo.com, shutterfly.com or photoworks.com.

Though these are all good sites for printing photos, they don't help you much in the event of #1. Why is that you ask? Because though you loaded your photo's from your fancy new 6 Megapixel camera, they only allow you to look at a small thumbnail. The original does sit on their servers, but there's no easy way to get it back (ofoto let's you purchase an Archive CD for almost as much money as at would cost to buy a CD Burner for you PC!!! Only photoworks.com let's you get back your original photo, but you have to do this one by one, by selecting a photo and clicking on "download this picture". Try doing that with the 8,000+ photo's that I've currently taken!!!)

Correct answer… Sign up for an account at fotki.com.

Fotki.com?!??!?! I've never heard of them, what do they have that the others don't? For one, they not only allow you to link to (and download if you wish) your original full-sized photos, but they even have FTP access to their site, for both uploading and downloading (more on just why that is a huge benefit later). Is their site free? Not really (hey, nothing good in life ever is). They do offer a free version, where you are limited to 10MB, which is a good way to try out the service, and to see if I'm talking the truth, or am actually full of goose droppings. :-) So, for $30/year (as of this writing) you get UNLIMITED storage and bandwidth (unless you abuse it). Hey, as I mentioned before, i've got over 8,000 photos (16+ GIG) on their site. For $30/year I'm not only happy with the peace of mind that my photo's are in multiple places (more on that later, #2), but that I don't have to email multiple multi-megapixel photo's of Johnny/Janey's birthday party to all my relative's and friends (don't you really want this clogging up your INBOX?). Instead I point them to a link at
, and they can view/download/print photo's to their heart's content.

Correct answer #2… Hey, what about Flickr.com? Aren't you up on the latest hot trend in online photography? What kind of blog is this you dinosaur!

Well, you're right, and wrong. I did have my head in the sand over looking for other photo sites, since I was so impressed with what I was getting from fotki. However I finally wandered over to flickr after reading a cool story about their site. For those of you that haven't checked it out yet, here's what I see as being SO COOL about flickr, and ultimately how I see it as an alternative way of storing online photo's (alternative, not replacement), and how I'm using both differently.

  • Good News: With , your photo's aren't categorized in "folders" like most filing metaphor's that we're used to, but with instead it uses "tags". What this means is that a photo can have multiple ways of being looked up, not just by knowing where you originally put it away. In fotki, I store my photo's in a series of nested folders, first by Public/Private (hey, I don't want to share everything I do with the whole world!), then by Year, then by Month, and finally by Activity (i.e. Johnny's 1st Baseball Game, Janey's Tea Party, etc). Then I load every picture I take, at full resolution (hey, why not, fotki's giving me UNLIMITED storage). I know, wasteful American. Sorry, but I never know when I am going to want that out of focus shot of the dog for some future project or photo album. But I digress, where was I? Oh yeah, flickr's "tags". With tags, you load up all your photo's in one big box, and then associate one or more labels with each photo. Why is this so way cool? Well, if you take your time and do it right, you can easily get different extracts from your photo collection that are quite fun and interesting to browse through, that would simply be impossible to do any other way. But now for the really cool part… you can then look at the universe of other flickr users' photo's with the same tags. Now that might not be so interesting for a tag like "2004" or "me", but can be quite revealing for moderately
    obscure tags like "Yellow", "Tuxedo", "Sunglasses", etc. In addition, Flickr will then show you "related" tags, like "urban" is related to "city" , "street" and "graffiti". (This often can give you additional ideas on how to tag your own pictures). BTW, "tags" are also being used by google's gmail, which is still cool new way to do an old thing, but just not quite as cool as flickr. With email, you can now put a message into multiple, virtual, folders, instead of having to pick just one (or god forbid leaving every message in your INBOX!)
  • Bad News: Even with a fully paid up version of flickr, you are limited to 1 gb/month of bandwidth. Back to me for a moment… this would be almost a year and a half of waiting until I can get all my photo's uploaded (not to mention all the new pictures I'm taking). So what am I supposed to do with this great service with an apparently huge flaw?
  • Good News/Bad News: Flickr let's you upload, view and download full sized photos (as of now no FTP access, which I know I promised to explain later why this is bad) but it's sort of like photoworks, there's no easy/automated way to do this. So, my great big realization about flickr is…. this isn't necessarily a negative for flickr, but just a bit of guidance on how best to use the site. I'm a stubborn guy, and it took me a little while to figure this out, but once I did all the planets lined up:
    • Don't upload every photo you've ever taken to flickr
    • Allow flickr to resize your photo's when uploading! (thank god I still have fotki)
  • Good News: This makes the 1 GB/month limit not as critical a limit, and also has the added benefit of freeing you up to actually have some chance to actually add meaningful tags to your pictures, which after, is what makes flickr so cool in the first place.

So… I'm now using Fotki for my backup/definitive copy of all my digital photos PLUS I'm using flickr for cool slicing and dicing.

- The Goose

P.S. "More on that later" #1& #2 …. This deserves it's own blog entry, and I've rambled on long enough for now, so I'll make another post shortly.