What are the servers you use for your images, cost and benefits of choices?

Must add http://pbase.com

US$23 yearly for 1000 MB of photo storage.
US$43 yearly for 2000 MB of photo storage.
US$60 yearly for 3000 MB of photo storage.

$23 a month for 1000MB would give you 5,000 200KB images stored!

Additional storage can be added at any time in increments of 1000 MB.

Now that seems inexpensive, but here are matters to consider:

PRIVACY: Most companies, such as this one, seem to give themselves rights to use your information for their, Trusted Partners". that means, essentially that your data is transferred to other companies, but the transfer is not an actual sale??? PBase.com, even for paid accounts, have this policy!

USE OF PICTURES: Are they taking a royalty-free license for themselves to use your pictures?

SALE OF IMAGES: Can the company license or sell your pictures commercially or to folk just wanting a print for their home or greeting card etc?

Check before you get a "free" service. You may be surprised by what rights you are giving away

Asher

Since this thread also included ftp choices etc., I just found a way with Windows 7 to access your ftp files without any pain. I had been using Filezilla for a long while, but this is even easier and faster.

The trick is to create a network for ftp which will enter your username and passoword once only and it will just become an simple affair of drag and drop.

I do not know if this works in other OS than Windows 7, but you could always check.

The procedure is simple
- in Windows Explorer (not the browser) go to where you have your Computer
- Right-click your computer and select - Add Network Location
- A window will open, choose Custom Network Location, click NEXT
- Enter the url of the website you will be accessing, click NEXT
- Enter your username, Click NEXT
- Enter passwork, Click SAVE PASSWORD, Click NEXT
- If you have more than one website, give it a name so you can differentiate them.
- log in

Once you have done this, your ftp will look just like a drive in the area that you access all your drives. Whatever you want to upload or download, you do exactly like you would copying files from one drive to the next.

Hope this can help someone.
- Enter

I just discovered that Dropbox will work for linking.

Open an account, place your photo in the Public folder, right-click on the file and choose Copy Public Link, and past the link into OPF.

Free and simple.

John

John Wolf said:

I just discovered that Dropbox will work for linking.

Open an account, place your photo in the Public folder, right-click on the file and choose Copy Public Link, and past the link into OPF.

Free and simple.

John

Click to expand...

John,

Do you give away rights to the picture?

John Wolf said:

I just discovered that Dropbox will work for linking.

Open an account, place your photo in the Public folder, right-click on the file and choose Copy Public Link, and past the link into OPF.

Free and simple.

Click to expand...

Hi John,

That's correct, but be aware. Dropbox is intended more for 'working in the cloud' (having one's files available at multiple locations and for sharing with co-workers). I've see access blocked when traffic got too high (e.g. some people from DPReview sharing Raw files). So this may not be the safest choice for high traffic solutions (although I don't know what they consider to be 'high').

Otherwise, I'm a happy user of their service. It also works together just fine with my smart phone, when I shoot an image or video, or find an interesting PDF, I can share it with my dropbox account and have the files available on my desktop when I get back home.

Cheers,
Bart

Asher Kelman said:

Do you give away rights to the picture?

Click to expand...

Hi Asher,

It's an on-line file storage service which mirrors the contents of a folder on your computer, it doesn't care about images or Word documents, just files. One can declare a folder Private or Public, and in the latter case one could share a link to its files.

Cheers,
Bart

Asher Kelman said:

Do you give away rights to the picture?

Click to expand...

No, according to the terms agreement, you retain full rights to your files on Dropbox.

I agree, Bart, that it's not ideal, but Asher said he was looking for cheap and easy recommendations. Dropbox is one of the handiest web apps of the past few years.

But I second the view above that the best solution is for OPF to have its own storage.

John