This thread is chock-a-block full of information - it's taken me a couple of days to get through it! While I'm more adept at dealing with my digital files, I've never been particularly happy with the photo sites I've tried, and am always on the lookout for something better. A number of good suggestions here that I'll look into further!

And now here's some more - I'll share my current methods, and help with some of the terminology:
- Like others, I <i>download</i> my photos from my camera to my computer. I have a 500GB Toshiba portable hard disk specifically for storage, and about once a year make a series of backup CD's from that.
- I then edit my photos in Photoshop, because I use it for work and am comfortable with it. Like others, I always make a copy of the photo I am about to edit, then work from there so that the original remains intact. Note that this is especially important with programs like iPhoto, iMovie and Windows Picture Editor, as even a small change like rotation will permanently change the file.
- For the photos I want to share online, my last step in editing is to resize their image size, again making a copy (so that I'd now have 3 versions of the same photo). Myers and others give very good resizing info; I would add that a good rule of thumb for online photos is to keep dimensions of 800 x 600 pixels (or 600 x 800 for portrait orientation). High pixel count is primarily important for printing; screen resolution keeps a standard of 72ppi (pixels per inch).
- At this point, I <i>upload</i> the photos I want to share to "the cloud" (the internet). This process *copies* the photo(s) I have selected on *my* hard drive to the chosen site's server.
- Depending on how I want to share the photos, I currently use one of multiple sites:
(a) If I want to share one or a few photos, Flickr is great for easy uploading (once you install the uploader software to your computer). I can give the URL for a specific photo to anyone with computer access, and Flickr lets you set your own copyright levels. I don't care about getting feedback from the Flickr community. I do mind that anyone can find these photos at any time, so I'm careful to only post photos I'm not too attached to. And I dislike the Flickr layout.
(b) I happen to enjoy sharing photos of events with my FB community, so I use their uploader to post photos, then tag my friends. While I'm confident that my photos are private now (and test periodically to ensure it's so), I am aware that FB changes their privacy settings all the time; I always have the expectation that these photos may become public at any time.
(c) For printing, I happen to really like the quality of Shutterfly's products. Easy editing tools, great quality for photos, cards, even mouse pads. Like ellenem, I did set up a shutterfly share site, but never played around with it much and remember it as feeling a bit awkward. I also like that I don't get bombarded by emails or other advertising from Shutterfly - I've had the account for years and they just let me do my occasional thing there. This was not my experience once Ofoto became Kodak Gallery.
(d) I have my own website and do upload photos there... but this is the piece I'm trying to improve! I'm off to go explore zenfolio and myphotoalbum. Thanks everyone!

If you have an iMAC you can create albums reasonably easily (well -I admit to a headache, two kirs and a mental temper tantrum until technologically challenged me got the hang of it) at what I thought was a reasonable cost. But that said, I haven't checked out others.
Macs use iPhoto which comes with the iMAC, you load your photos from the camera, they come up in a sidebar and you drag and drop them onto the page. You can customise the number of photos per page and add a small amount of text if you want. Not enough space there really. There is a small tick against the photos you have used so you don't duplicate. You can also choose the background colour of each page. 60 pages in hardback format cost me around $ Aust 100 including postage. You send the order online BUT you can only send it to Apple.
Waiting to get it back at the moment .... you can make calendars too.

Ggreen brings up a good point about "back up" of photos once you download them to your computer. I have all my photo images on my hard drive and I, too, would make a DVD once a year as a back up. However, I began to worry that the one time my computer would die, would be the one time I hadn't gotten around to that back-up DVD yet. So I signed up for Carbonite. It is an automatic back up system for about $55 per year. I know that's a bit pricey, but our home got a power surge last summer from a lightening storm. That one little incident literally fried every piece of electronic equipment in our home -- everything! It was all gone in a (pardon the pun) FLASH! Blew right through all those fancy surge protectors that DH had installed. Luckily our home owners insurance replaced the hardware. Luckily my photos were backed up. I urge you to get some kind of back up protection or be diligent about making your own -- <b>and store those back up DVDs outside your house.</b> If you have a fire -- the computer <u>and</u> the back will be gone.

http://www.carbonite.com/en-us/default.aspx?re=1

Speaking of on-line, printed photo albums; I got an email "thank you" from Trip Advisor this week (for posting a review last year). It is a "free" album from Shutterfly.com. I used Shutterfly for my first album. I think Oprah had a free deal a year or so ago. This is a cheap way to give this medium a first try.
------------------------------------------

<i>Your gift: Free Shutterfly photo book*

• 8"x8" 20-page photo book— a $29.99 value.
Taxes, shipping & handling may apply.

Enter promo code
<b>TA06-CNKS-X7KM-921MPD</b></I>

Ooh, very good point TC! And I'm lazy and don't store those discs "offsite" from my apartment. Good call.

I've been meaning to look into online backup. My boyfriend uses that method exclusively for his stuff, but my photos are way too important to me to trust only to something I can't physically see or hold! OTOH, because they're important to me, I like to have multiple methods of backup for my files. (In addition to the very real possibilities of power surges - happened to my mom just like you described - and other physical damage, storage methods for digital media just don't have the staying power of the old analog ways. CD-ROMs degrade in a way that film negatives never did!)

Gonna go check out Carbonite - thanks!

Ggreen, You don't even have to lock up the back up discs in a safe deposit box or anything near so fancy. We just exchange them with DD or a friend. That we if anything happens to any of our homes, the other has the back up off-site. No big deal to toss a little DVD or CDs in a desk drawer for someone.

Lightening has caused damaging power surges to at least 3 homes in our neighborhood -- all at different times! It happens more often than one would think.

So is Carbonite "cloud" storage?

Yes, that's exactly it: online / "cloud" storage. :)

TC, I immediately thought of sending them off to my mother (and I'd take hers in return). It just never occurred to me before, and it's such a good point!

I've been in the disk drive industry for 25 years and know a bit about what can go wrong with them. We joke that they operate on PFM, which can be translated as Pure Freaking Magic (actually an insider pun on MFM, Modulated Frequency Modulation, an old disk drive encoding scheme).

I have my stuff on three disk drives that are never all plugged in at the same time. They are stored in different parts of the house, but TC's suggestion of having one off-site is good.

I have not gone to cloud storage like Carbonite yet, but that is where things are going. It has its pluses and minuses.

Whatever scheme you use, choose one that is easy for you so you actually use it. A great benefit of digital photography over film is that you can now easily have an <i>exact</i> duplicate of your original image, but that is little comfort if they are all in one shoebox.

ggreen, I just don't get how Facebook works, I guess. I just checked. My privacy settings are set for "everyone" to see my posts and photos. I did that so that non members and non friends could see the photos, and I don't plan to post much of my personal life like many people. But I also have "my wall" set to be seen by Friends only. So why you could see my wall but not my photos is beyond me!

<i>I just don't get how Facebook works</i>

EXACTLY ! Me too. That's why I stay far, far away from it.

On a slightly different note, I always keep my original photos on my original camera card. I don't erase the originals. When a card gets filled up, I put it away in storage. That way I know I always have my originals, besides the ones on my MacBook, my iPad, and my backup hard drive. Yes, I am slightly OCD regarding photos!

I did use an on-line photo album service several years ago, when I inherited our family's photo albums with vintage pictures going back to the 1920s. I diligently scanned each one, to preserve them for everyone in the family to see. I created on-line albums, posted them on this website service, and e-mailed everyone to tell them they are available. Not that many family members actually looked at them, but at least I know they are all digitized now.

I have forgotten which service I used, though. duh.

I also would strongly recommend www.blurb.com for making photo albums. If you are interested, you may see an album my wife and I prepared from our trip in June to Brugge, Paris and Brussels.http://www.blurb.com/bookstore/detail/1546686

Hmm, neo, that's so wierd! I agree that your settings are exactly as they should be.

When I click on the link you provided, I get a page that says "Sorry, something went wrong. We're working on getting this fixed as soon as we can." and a link to Go Back. When I click that, I just get my News Feed... I assumed the error message was because I didn't have permission to see your photos. (I find that FB often doesn't have accurate error messages, thus the assumption.)

If you look at the URL, it's a string of redirects to various php files (tech-y, I know); the first is profile.php and the ID number for your profile, and the last is the album ID. So I deleted all the other stuff in between, thinking it would show me the album. But instead, I got the Info tab on your profile page. I can only see two tabs: Wall and Info; clicking on the former shows me your Wall, meaning it's somehow open for non-Friends. However, I don't at all see a Photos tab!

Oh, one more thing I just thought of: at the bottom of each album, it says "Share this album with anyone by sending them this link." Not sure if that's what you copy/pasted here, but it might be worth a shot... Or else of course use a different (easier!) site for sharing pics. :)

For the record, I just clicked on the link NP provided and got the Facebook login page (I'm not on Facebook, so can't log in).

On the topic of keeping one's original camera memory cards as a backup, as PeaceOut does:

I completely support the idea of being obsessive-compulsive about one's photos. They're precious and irreplaceable data, and it's worth a lot of extra time and expense to keep them safe. However, I'm not sure if memory cards are the best way to do that. For one thing, memory cards are very expensive per unit storage, compared to hard drives. But also, I wonder about their long-term stability.

I'm particularly worried about the reliability of memory cards since my last vacation, in which a memory card suddenly became unreadable while I was taking photos. It was an awful experience. I lost about three days worth of photos. My next step was to go to a local computer store and buy a cheap laptop -- from then on I copied all of my photos over to the laptop and the end of each day (I told you I believe in being OCD about photos!)

When I finally returned home, I found a fantastic free recovery program online, and I was able to use it to recover all of my lost photos. However, I've been very suspicious of memory cards ever since then.

Nelson, as someone in the memory business, what would you say is the safest method for long-term storage of digital data?

hawksbill, I'm old fashioned and am still a believer in hard drives. It's not just because that's the industry I work in, they still make the most sense to me.

Every few years something comes around that claims it will knock spinning magnetic media off its pedestal, (bubble memory, holographic crystals, flash), but it still hasn't happened. There are good reasons for that. The price / reliability curve for hard drives is hard to beat.

In four yours of using a digital camera I have also had one memory card failure, with some photos being unrecoverable, even with trying several online software packages. That made me paranoid about cards.

But in 25 years and countless thousands of hours using hard drives, I've only had one fail at home. And that one gave early warning signals (it had trouble spinning up due to a problem known as stiction, uncommon these days), so I was able to replace it before total failure.

I know that in one of our labs a shock and vibe test knocked a solid state disk apart while the spinning magnetic drive continued to run. I'm not sure about the longevity of flash memory cells themselves.

Backing up on multiple CD/DVDs always seemed cumbersome to me, but I suppose that's an option.

So I like disk drives.

I'm not very nerdy at home, but if I was, and OCD, I'd get a mirrored RAID array so you always automatically have one backup, then I'd back <i>that</i> up periodically, maybe to a cloud. TC's suggestion of keeping backups at different location is great icing on the cake. As mentioned I don't do that myself, but I might start thinking about it. That is an advantage of cloud storage. At the moment I'm comfortable with my 3 disk solution and periodic manual backups.

That's my $0.02, hope it helps!

Nelson, thanks so much for sharing your knowledge on this matter. You have reinforced and validated the information I have gleaned over the years from various associates and articles.

I have heard that solid state drives are the "gold standard" and that there's a question about the longevity of flash memory, as you said. Unfortunately, when I last looked into solid state, the price was beyond what I could afford!

Right now I just have a 1 disk solution, plus the (decidedly cumbersome) CD/DVD backup. Your methodology sounds like something to aim for myself!

Unlike Nelson, I have had 4 hard drive failures at home over the years (complete, dead-as-a-doornail failures). So while I still keep my photos and music on a hard drive, I now have multiple external hard drives and the photos and music are backed up on more than one.