The Case For Online Photo Storage

Every year I pay to have my photos stored with SmugMug and Flickr.  I use SmugMug for my personal photos and Flickr for the coffee photos used on Coffee Hero and INeedCoffee.   My SmugMug account has 9,831 photos.  The Flickr site holds 2,762 photos.

Let me quickly tell you my story of why I am glad I have remote photo backup.

In October 2003, my house was evacuated as fires raced across San Diego.  My house was spared, but I know others that lost everything.  Every photo.  During the fires, I went around emergency barricades with a friend so we could get to her photos before the fire came to her home.  We risked our lives choking on smoke to save photos.   I can not stress how important remote photo backup is.

Many years ago I wrote my own code to manage my online photo galleries.   Now I gladly outsource this role to SmugMug and Flickr.   Why?

1. Managing thousands of photos is a task better suited for a team of developers and not an individual.
2. Photos have grown in size as cameras have added megapixels.  This fills our hard drives quickly.
3. Hard drives and computers do fail.
4. SmugMug and Flickr backup all media and that backup is remote.  You may be diligent about backing up to a remote drive or burning DVDs, but if you are a victim of fire or theft that won’t help you much.  Both companies back up the photos, so I don’t have to it.

Why SmugMug and Flickr?  I am not a fan of any photo site that requires one to create an account to view someones photos.  I am also not a fan of cluttered sites with ads that are pushing you to buy prints.   There are 100% free sites out there, but free sites can’t stay free forever.  They either end up charging users or they turn the user interface into an ad-cluttered visual nightmare.   In some cases they just shutdown.

Screenshot of my Elvis the Concert photo gallery on SmugMug.

This leaves Flickr and SmugMug.  I like both, but I prefer SmugMug.  SmugMug has amazing customer support and great tools like Send To SmugMug and Album Fetcher.  Send to SmugMug is a file uploader application that runs on your computer, which is similar to the Flickr Uploader.  Album Fetcher allows you to pull down complete photo galleries after you’ve uploaded them.

One thing Flickr does that annoys me is they embed “nofollow” into every outbound link.  SmugMug doesn’t do this.  What this means is that if I create a blog with a few photos and I decide to link to that blog, Flickr tells the search engines to explicitly NOT FOLLOW the link.  They want the traffic for themselves.  Now this isn’t a problem if the account were a free service, but Flickr Pro users pay for their accounts.  Then Flickr has the balls to require link backs to Flickr when you go to embed photos, even if they are your own photos.

SmugMug doesn’t play those games.

My SmugMug referral code is: IzodUqeQndZYc It will save you $5 if you decide to open a new SmugMug account.