Alanz Eyes

Online Photo Hosting

July 25th, 2005 - Posted by Alan Howard

There's a lot of websites out there that offer you free hosting for your photos, but unfortunately, most of them don't offer a lot of space. For example, my new-ish photo album website, available from the link on the right, only allows me to store 30 Mb of photos. This isn't a lot really. If you post 20 photos a month, at 100kb each, that's 2 Mb a month. In 15 months you'll have run out of space, and then you're screwed.

So I've had my eye open for something better. I found it.

www.zoto.com

It allows you to store up to 2 Gb (2,000 Mb for those of you who don't know what a Gb is). At 100 kb per photo, that's up to… well, let me show you this little example:

100 kb per photo
x 10 photos = 1,000 kb = 1 Mb
x 100 photos = 10,000 kb = 10 Mb
x 1,000 photos = 10,0000 kb = 100 Mb
x 10,000 photos = 1,000,000 kb = 1000 Mb = 1 Gb

So 2 Gb will allow you to store 20,000 photos. If you store 20 photos per month, at 100kb per photo, that means it will take 83 years to reach a 2 Gb storage limit. Impressive hey?

And storage limits are only going to get bigger as time goes by, and hard drives become cheaper and therefore more available.

The only concern I have, and one which will always ensure I have a backup on my computer or CD / DVD, is that the online photo host goes out of business or there's an extreme server crash where all data is lost forever. Or the world goes to hell and everything dies….

I can just imagine me, sitting there in the dark, looking at the powerless laptop, and the CDs and DVDs marked 'Photos', wishing I could see those photos one more time before I die…

Ah… the good ol' days of printed photos and real photo albums that you could drag out of the cupboard and go through when you're feeling nostalgic.

Would you believe that I still have every single photo I've taken in my entire life, in photo albums (the book kind) or still in the envelope from the photo printing shop. They're in a couple of boxes. Every now and again I look through them with nostalgia for the past.

I hope we have electricity forever. If we don't, I've got 5 or so years of photos in digital format that will be lost forever.

The future, while exciting in its promise, is also terrifying for everything we can lose if it all fails.

Entry Filed under: Pre-2006