Backing Up My Photos To The Cloud: Picasa Web Albums

    I'm sure that many of you out there have asked this question, "how should I back up my photos?" In the days of 2.0 MP cameras, I would back them up to CD(s), and as the resolution inched up toward 10.0 MP, this changed to DVD(s). It was a task that I didn't enjoy, sometimes Nero wouldn't work correctly, sometimes there would be a disk write error, and sometimes I just wasn't in the mood. Also, I was always worried that a computer crash and building fire would occur simultaneously (I'm really not that paranoid) and destroy any backups of my photos. 

    So, about 1 year ago I started using Picasa, which is a freebie by Google, that allows photo editing, sharing, and organizing. Prior to this I used Corel Photo-Paint which is better at editing than Picasa, but was not very user friendly and not a freebie. I had wanted to start using Adobe Photoshop, but I just couldn't justify the price. Anyways, about a month into using Picasa, I discovered Picasa Web Albums, which allows web storage of photos (~1 GB) along with sharing (most photos on this blog come from a web album) and geocoding. The original photo quality can be maintained and any changes to the photo done within Picasa will be synched to the web. The photos should be extremely safe on Google servers because.....well... it's Google!! Currently I have 380 MB of my web storage, to upgrade my storage to 10 GB/year (which can be used as storage for any Google App) is just $20 USD/year. For this low price I think it's definitely worth it to use web albums, plus I can access them from anywhere as along as there's an internet connection. If you know of any better places to store photos, please leave a comment below.