Thursday, May 16, 2013

Photos in the clouds

This is not meant to be a comprehensive list, just a starting point, prompted by the recent upgrades to skydrive & google+. The following services all offer free cloud storage, have a decent TOS (terms of service) that mean you still own the copyright to your files (unlike other  Social Net service like Facebook & Instagram who assume they own the copyright to anything you upload, others strip out your metadata) . They have private/public sharing options that you control.. All can be used from a variety of computers and mobile devices (apps are available for most devices) and all have the ability to mirror the cloud storage across your own computer device (desktops, laptops, phones, tablets). In other words all offer a decent service.

Drop Box 2GB Drop Box capacity
Box 5GB Box capacity
GMail, Google Drive
Picasa/Google+ Photo
15GB* Google+ Photo capacity
SkyDrive/Outlook/(Hotmail) 25GB* Sky Drive capacity
* Shared space

Cleary Forty Seven gigabytes of space is a lot. How does that relate to how many photos you can save, its approximately twenty four thousand  (or more) jpeg files of the size taken by compact cameras and smart phones, Around three thousand three hundred full sized RAW files, as taken by recent high megapixel model DSLR cameras or four hundred & seventy five-ish HD movie clips (30second to 2minues) or eleven and three quarter eight gigabyte SD cards. So if your an occasional IPhone snapper that’s probably a life time of memories but for a professional photographer it could be just.a few days or a weeks worth of their photographic work. The rest of us will fit somewhere in between and I suspect it will be bandwidth that arbitrates how quickly our photos fill the clouds, but I’m now sure they will.

Jpeg Format Phhotos   DSLR RAW format PhotosHD .mov clipssd memory card

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