Med-Psych.com

I've been spending quite a bit of time over the past few weeks trying to figure out the best way to store my photos and videos on the web. I want to do this for two main reasons. 1) I want to have a permanent backup storage of my photos / videos 2) I want to be able to share the photos / videos across multiple computers and with friends and family.

I have several computers I use on a regular basis. Sometimes I download my memory card to one computer and sometimes to another. I'm realizing that this is not a great way to make sure I have all of my photos and videos easily accessible. I've recently become more interested in the "cloud" as a way to manage using multiple computers and it seems there are many good options. Unfortunately, I can't seem to find something that does everything I need.

I first figured that I could use Google docs as a great place to store my media. Unfortunately, Google docs is limited to 1 gb of free space. Fortunately, they offer additional space at a reasonable cost - $5 for 20gb. I still figured there should be a good free option out there.

I next came across Microsoft Live Skydrive. This seemed like a great solution, including 25gb of free storage space. Then I realized the problem. Microsoft limits uploads to 50 megabytes each. This is fine for photos but doesn't work for videos, especially high def videos. There are ways to work around the upload size limit, such as gladinet. Gladinet is pretty nice, but if you want to get past the 50mb size limits on skydrive, you need to buy the pro version. It isn't that expensive, but it isn't free. I also don't like the idea of depending on a 3rd party software to stay current with the primary storage site. If Skydrive changes its protocol, I don't want to be stuck where I can't restore my files saved there.

Looking at the upload limits, I decided that Google may wind up serving me better. I also was playing around with the Picasa software and had fun playing with the facial recognition features for marking people in photos. While the facial recognition is far from perfect, it creates a great way to organize photos and quickly find photos of people. I then tried the Picasa Web Albums, uploading my photos from Picasa to the web.

There were a few features I immediately liked with Picasaweb. First, it saves the facial recognition tags that I created on my computer. Anyone viewing the photos on the web can see the people I identified and tagged. Second, and possibly most important to me, is that it saves the date I took the photo AND VIDEO. Windows Live Skydrive does show the date a photo was taken, but with videos it only shows when it was uploaded. Picasa Web Albums is the only online storage spot I've found that saves the date the video was taken.

Knowing the dates when photos and videos were taken is important to me. Maybe it isn't so important to other people but I like to know how old people were in a specific photo, etc. Also, it is a very nice option to be able to sort photos by the date they were taken. I don't know why other online services don't include the same created date information for videos. Picasaweb is the only one I've found so far with this feature. Even youtube doesn't automatically insert the created date. It is cumbersome in Youtube to enter the created date - either in the edit options screen or just entering the date in the description field. While this can be done, if you are uploading more than 10 or so videos at once, it's a pain to go through and manually enter the information.

Unfortunately, Picasaweb has some drawbacks. The biggest one so far, and may be a dealbreaker for me, is that there isn't a way to download the videos from the web - at least not a direct way that I have found. There is no way I've found to download the original file. One of the main reasons I want to upload videos online is to act as a backup of the originals. If I can't download them in the future, then I'd be stuck just watching them online. And that brings up the second issue - poor video performance. The videos just don't appear smooth. If I'm stuck watching them online, at least they could look decent. I was able to right-click and view video details and it appears that on Youtube, the videos are playing back at 30 fps; whereas, on Picasaweb, the videos are playing back at only around 10 fps. Also, on Picasaweb, there are many dropped frames.

The other thing I noticed with Youtube, is that while it does allow a download of the video, it isn't the original file. It is an mp4 file, although it does appear to be in 1080p resolution at least for my AVCHD uploads. The file is about 1/4th the size of the original avchd file that my camera originally created. I didn't look closely enough at the video quality to compare just how much worse it is, but I would prefer to have the ability to download the original file if my local system crashes. For Flip camera uploads that are 640x480, the mp4 file downloaded is only 480x360.

At this time, there doesn't seem to be an ideal solution. What I am likely going to do is continue with Picasaweb for my photos. I've already paid the $5 for a year's worth of 20gb of space. I probably have 1-2gb worth of photos so there is plenty of space, but the 1mb wasn't enough. If I have videos I want to share, I'll probably upload the specific videos to youtube and enter in the date in the description section. The big advantage of Picasa over Skydrive is the way it handles the facial recognition tags. If there was a way to download the original video files it would be PERFECT. I wouldn't care that the online viewing is not great as I could always download the original for high quality viewing offline.

Skydrive would be my second choice. The biggest advantage is it is free for 25gb of space, which is plenty for my photos. It is not a good option for anything more than small videos due to the 50mb file upload limit. I haven't found an easy way to tag people in photos like Picasa (but I haven't really looked much either).

Youtube is the best for video sharing and decent for storage but the lack of saving the created date and inability to get the original file remains a limitation.

I briefly looked at Flickr, but it seemed like there were similar size limits and videos didn't save the created date either. Same with Photobucket. Dropbox has 2gb free and idrive has 5gb free but then is pricier if you need more than that ($5-10/month). I didn't even check out the interfaces for idrive and dropbox.

If someone has better suggestions, I'd love to hear about them. In the meantime, I'll stick with Picasaweb for photos and backup videos on a second computer at home.