I've had my computer on constantly for the last few days, uploading, yawn. I've been looking at cloud storage for my vast quantity of photos. It all started when my Mac told me I was down to critically low storage, in fact too little to boot. I have a portable hard disk for storing pictures but I learnt the hard way with my last one that when they fail, there's nothing you can do to recover the data. My option is to keep two disks or to back it up online. As with all things I was looking for the most economical way to back them up to cloud storage when I discovered a free way!! If you let google back them up to their google photo storage so long as you select the smaller file size there is no limit on the number you can store.
There are few down points, for starters unless you have super fast broadband this is going to take forever. Mine is at 0.5Mbps so it will take a while and secondly some people have paranoia about putting their photos into a huge company's database where they can do pretty much what they please with them. No doubt their legal team have stated you no longer have rights to your photos etc, etc, etc. As mine are just family snaps with no commercial value I'm not too worried. As I already use blogger I suspect google already owns my soul! Also I just can't see anyone being that interested in my pictures, I never took any incriminating photos with any of my murder victims anyhow.
Some plus points, they're available if my hard drive dies again and should live forever in the cloud for my kids to see. Plus they do some really cool stuff with them. They auto edit some for you, make panoramas out of suitable batches of photos and make animations which have given us no end of joy.
You may remember a while ago Kev wanted to see what everyone looked like. We tried to take a selfie with the kids and took a few to try and get everyone looking. Google put them into an animation and it brought back the fun we had trying to take the photo.
It also makes storyboards, grouping together holiday photos into an album. The amazing thing though is that it adds the location to the album, for example it made one for us entitled, 'A holiday to Malta'. My camera is old and it doesn't add location data, I didn't even have my mobile phone on me to enable GPS tracking, it seems to use recognition software to match locations. Scary? maybe a little but with nothing to hide it's also pretty phenomenal.
Anyway, it's up to us all how our data is stored and used, but if you don't mind, like us, it's a pretty cool way to store priceless pictures.
That is a very cool animation
ReplyDeleteWell, the animation gets distracting. It's as though it's the only thing your eyes can go to. I guess that's why they use it for adverts! I tend to close those kinds of sites out pretty quick. I must say, however, you have a really good looking family!
ReplyDeleteI liked your animation. I have no idea how those things work but they're very interesting.
ReplyDeleteI back all my computer files up to Microsoft Cloud. I think I pay them .98 cents a month. All my family photos, my gun photos, my tax records, statements I've scanned, the whole nine yards. Now if the computer goes I just get a new one and no harm done!
Love your little clip, your family looks so much fun, as for google owning your soul, I think they own all of us, but like you we are just too small for them to notice.
ReplyDeleteLove the animation! I might have to look into this as all mine is backed up on a second hard drive.
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