Think about this, on my previous post I wrote about this but I haven't sorted it out completely yet but now I have. I have now uploaded/backed up most of my photos to the web. This is so great. Yes I understand it is only 2048*2048 but when is the last time you printed larger than A3? For that in any case you can upload bigger photos and Picasa will give you 1Gig for free for those larger ones.
So how does it work?
You download Picasa for your PC/Mac. Once you've installed it and run it, it will go through all your photos. You can do other stuff like sync other folders etc. Then you select the folders you want to sync to the web, and press the button. It will then ask you at what size you want to do it, if you keep it under the 2048 mark then ALL the uploaded photos are for FREE, they don't eat up your storage space.
Now that is what I call great. I mean you can upload thousands of photos at no cost. If you are like me I hardly print photos these days, then this is by far the best medium to store it in. I am sure there are some other providers in the game as well, and I will blog about that in the future when I find something. But Picasa for me is more than enough.
Once your photos are on the web life becomes a whole lot easier to let friends and family see them. You can copy your photos to other albums on the web, and then share that album with the people you want to share it with. Can send people a link to a photo, you can share a whole album with them. Picasa would mail them automatically should you include them in it. The great thing is that when people are part of G+ sharing becomes a whole lot easier. I use G+ exclusively for photo sharing with various people.
You can also do a whole lot more, things like giving your photos a location should they not have it, especially those older photos before it became possible.
You can tag your photos, you can tag people, people who are part of the album can comment on the photos. This is an awesome setup for people with a lot of photos.
The other great thing is that if you use the G+ app on your smart phone and take photos through the app it automatically uploads it for you to your Picasa album. It makes life a whole lot easier for sharing should you want to.
Most of my photos are not open to the public and I will keep it like that. I don't have to share everything. But when I want to share something, I don't have to take a year to get things uploaded etc. These days as soon as I plug my phone/camera in, I import via Picasa, hit the sync button and there you go. It uploads while you work.
Obviously a big internet line is necessary and many people don't have that yet, but with uncapped lines becoming cheaper and cheaper by the month you might consider getting one of those. Although I don't even use uncapped as I prefer my internet speed not to be throttled. I find Axxess to be cheap on their prices with very reliable connection to the internet. I hardly go over 60gigs a month.
Another I haven't mentioned yet is the fact that you can also upload videos for free. You can use Youtube for that which is also part of Google. If you keep it under 15min it is free.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Feedback on this project:
I have now uploaded most of my photos of the last 5 years. Basically all my digital photos. I have one more year to go and then all is done. I am surprised at how easy it was to do it. Especially with the Picasa Software on my PC. I had a few snags along the way like deleting a whole album of my hard drive and off the web.
What I ended up doing is to put all my photos I wanted to upload in folders on my hard drive in the pictures directory. Then I would tag the photos, I would select the faces and put names to them. Once that was done I selected :sync to web on that specific folder. As soon as it was done, I deselected the sync for that folder, backed it up, and deleted it from my hard drive. Done. This was the easiest way to get my older photos on the web. You can also only move 1000 photos to a directory on the web. So if you have more than a 1000 photos in one directory it is best to do this for instance 2001 Upload 1;2001 upload 2 etc.
I have also decided to handle photos and videos as they come in. As soon as I have taken them, I bounce them to my computer, copy them to the 2012 folder. On my 2012 folder the sync is always on, so as soon as new photos or videos come in they get uploaded.
I am now looking for a way to merge my videos quickly and effectively so that it makes sense 2 years down the line. Sitting with hundreds of small videos of events doesn't help. Having to deal with that a year later is even worse. This is me happy for finally having my photos offsite and safe.
No comments:
Post a Comment