Thursday, July 24, 2003

Online Photo Resource Guide™
These days, there are a lot of ways to put photo albums on the web for free, or almost free, or for some kind of subscription fee. The intent of these sites is to allow consumers to upload pictures, invite friends to view them, send photo greeting cards, and sell ancillary merchandise and services.

These sites vary in their restrictions on amount of storage and their promises of retention, but hey! as long as they're free, sign up as often as you like. There is a definite trend for free sites to run out of money and either be acquired, disappear, or convert to some sort of subscription model, not necessarily in a manner convenient to their current customers. If you expect any of these sites, paid or free, to preserve your precious photos for ever, you are very foolish indeed. See thecasualty list if you doubt. My prediction; more instability until the price structure has more relationship to reality. The retail price of storage is around $1/Gb, so how can anyone expect to correct $50/yr for a few megabytes of storage? These sites do have expenses, but they're not primarily for storage.


The list is in approximate order of preference, from the viewpoint of a consumer seeking mass storage; but each site has special merits and demerits, so your preferences may differ.…

http://www.andromeda.com/people/ddyer/photo/albums.html

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