Fotki

[arith]

Fotki are up to their tricks again; to celebrate 17 years they say they are going to close all free accounts.

Does anybody know any decent free image display sites since Fotki also have closed paid accounts in the past so can't be trusted.

I've got about 4GB of images.

[Manfred M]

Fotki are up to their tricks again; to celebrate 17 years they say they are going to close all free accounts.

Does anybody know any decent free image display sites since Fotki also have closed paid accounts in the past so can't be trusted.

I've got about 4GB of images.

Flickr has a 1 TB per user free limit (and I am a Flickr user), but have a grand-fathered premium account.

I personally do not trust any of the storage sites, as business models can change, companies can change business direction, they can exit the business (Kodak had a image hosting site that people thought was secure, but they declared bankruptcy and exited the photo business). I only use them as part of my backup strategy, which includes redundant storage at home.

[arith]

I think Flickr is the way to go, lot of photo's to move. Oh boy why is no company reliable.

[Mike Buckley]

Oh boy why is no company reliable.

There is a huge difference between being a reliable company and being a company that is expected to provide a particular service for free for the rest of one's life. As much as I enjoy participating at CiC, I have no expectation that it will be available forever, much less for free.

[xpatUSA]

Originally Posted by arith Oh boy why is no company reliable.

There is a huge difference between being a reliable company and being a company that is expected to provide a particular service for free for the rest of one's life. As much as I enjoy participating at CiC, I have no expectation that it will be available forever, much less for free.

I find it interesting that any Company offers any free space at all for anything! Especially with images or video, it commits them to ever-growing server space, power consumption and potentially leaves them at the mercy of idiots who upload giant files and leave them there for ever. Over on another site, people upload 50+MB Sigma JPEGS and think nothing of it.

If not already, "the internet" will soon contribute significantly to both global warming and the CO2 thing. A bit bit like "clean electric cars" . . plug in the 20kW Tesla charger and a coal-fired powerplant somewhere "oop north" immediately belches out even more SO2 and NOx . . . (choke).

[Timar]

The 1TB Flickr offers for free is more than I will ever need for my JPEGs. For backing up RAW files, including the ablity to view the integrated JPEG, amazon prime offers unlimited(!) cloud storage for no addtional fee.

Concerning reliability, I think the larger the company the better. That's why I go with Flirckr and amazon.

[arith]

I used to pay Fotki for storage Ted but they did the dirty and when there was thousands of very large images they said they wanted more money, a lot more for a service I had already paid for.

They deleted all originals and all that is left is small jpegs, and now they want money for those 1000 x 1000 pixel images, not even big enough to display on a monitor.

I've tried to register with Flickr but it keeps saying the name is already used or the email is already in use and I can't remember registering before except with Yahoo for email I stopped using because it seems everybody knew the address.

Haven't tried Amazon yet.

[arith]

I used to pay Fotki for storage Ted but they did the dirty and when there was thousands of very large images they said they wanted more money, a lot more for a service I had already paid for.

They deleted all originals and all that is left is small jpegs, and now they want money for those 1000 x 1000 pixel images, not even big enough to display on a monitor.

I've tried to register with Flickr but it keeps saying the name is already used or the email is already in use and I can't remember registering before except with Yahoo for email I stopped using because it seems everybody knew the address.

Haven't tried Amazon yet.

[Manfred M]

I've tried to register with Flickr but it keeps saying the name is already used or the email is already in use and I can't remember registering before except with Yahoo for email I stopped using because it seems everybody knew the address.

Steve - this is correct; the Yahoo user name and password are the same ones as for Flickr. In other words, you already have a Flickr account.

[DanK]

I used to pay Fotki for storage Ted but they did the dirty and when there was thousands of very large images they said they wanted more money, a lot more for a service I had already paid for.

I suspect that there will be more of this. It's very common now to offer fixed-price deals with unlimited storage. Someone has to pay for all of the additional costs when individual users store more--more power, more equipment, more labor, more rent. It seems that up to now, companies have gambled that declining costs of storage or some source of funding other than user fees will cover that. Sooner or later, it seems to me, this model is going to crash, and vendors will have to do what vendors in most other business do: charge customers for what they are buying. Perhaps Fotki was just an early sign of what's to come.

I pay for two such services: Smugmug, for displaying a limited number of images, and Crashplan, for a second, offsite backup of all of my images. I don't assume that they will be able to maintain this pricing model indefinitely, but for now, both are cheap for what they provide. (Smugmug's service, by the way, has been consistently excellent--quick answers from real people who know what they are doing.)

I don't rely on the cloud for primary storage, partly for this reason, and never will. Local storage is now dirt cheap. I have two copies of every image I haven't discarded within a meter of me right now.

Ted--your comments are really the start of another thread, but I can't resist. You're right: most people I know ignore the fact that the "cloud" is actually a huge physical infrastructure that sucks up huge amount of power. One partial solution is what Amazon is doing: building solar facilities to power its cloud storage. That's not a complete solution, of course--the sun doesn't shine at night--but it can go a long way. I have solar panels on my house, and last year our production was 93% of our consumption. The last time I paid for power was April, when my excess production wasn't enough to cover the charge for connecting to the grid.

Re cars: again, I agree, many people ignore the environmental costs of producing the power used by electric cars, but all of the calculations I have seen show that mile for mile, electric cars are much cleaner--how much so depending on the source of power. The reason is not just the source. Electric cars don't idle, and if they are well designed, they have regenerative braking. We have two cars: a fairly large hybrid with regenerative braking, and a smaller conventionally powered car. In town, the fuel consumption of the hybrid is roughly half of that of the smaller conventional car.

[arith]

I have created a new account with Flickr, I've noticed that I'm the only one who can see my images on Fotki even though they say the account won't be deleted until October.

I've got a really hard job because although I have jpegs on my PC, they are full size and each folder contains many instances for instance bits of panorama. I used to use the Fotki to locate an ID for an image.

One folder for August 2009 has taken 2 hours to process, first sorting the jpeg, copy and paste into a new folder, delete as many repeated or part images as I can see, use process multiple files in PSE10 to resize, folder upload, then delete unwanted images some more, got the August 2009 folder down to 60 odd images from nearly 300.

Crikey, just 6 more years, although not many in some because I had a heart attack.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/136168436@N03/albums

[arith]

I have created a new account with Flickr, I've noticed that I'm the only one who can see my images on Fotki even though they say the account won't be deleted until October.

I've got a really hard job because although I have jpegs on my PC, they are full size and each folder contains many instances for instance bits of panorama. I used to use the Fotki to locate an ID for an image.

One folder for August 2009 has taken 2 hours to process, first sorting the jpeg, copy and paste into a new folder, delete as many repeated or part images as I can see, use process multiple files in PSE10 to resize, folder upload, then delete unwanted images some more, got the August 2009 folder down to 60 odd images from nearly 300.

Crikey, just 6 more years, although not many in some because I had a heart attack.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/136168436@N03/albums

[DanK]

One nice thing about Smugmug is that I never resize anything, and I never save any jpegs at all. I just export a full-size jpeg directly from Lightroom to Smugmug, without saving it. Smugmug resizes the image for display but keeps the full-size image on the server in case you want it (e.g., to sell an image, or to provide people with a large image to critique). However, that's a lot of storage, and they do charge, although not very much for the basic account.

[xpatUSA]

I used to pay Fotki for storage Ted but they did the dirty and when there was thousands of very large images they said they wanted more money, a lot more for a service I had already paid for.

They deleted all originals and all that is left is small jpegs, and now they want money for those 1000 x 1000 pixel images, not even big enough to display on a monitor.

I've tried to register with Flickr but it keeps saying the name is already used or the email is already in use and I can't remember registering before except with Yahoo for email I stopped using because it seems everybody knew the address.

Haven't tried Amazon yet.

Sorry to hear that, Steve.

I have my own website with HostGator and so far, touch wood, it's unlimited. One wonders how long for though, considering I only have Basic hosting! Every so often, and probably not often enough, I download the whole site to my HD and eventually all that gets onto my backup drive. Very few large images up there though, they're all for posting on-line.

I don't use these free/semi-free photo sites (slight head-wobble)- except for Google's Picasa for family snaps.