Where do you store your digital photos? Are you sure they are safe? Is it easy to print them from there? There is no perfectly safe backup medium for storing your precious photos. If you are not doing it already, you should consider using a variety of complementary back up procedures, so that if one or even two fail you don’t lose all your photos. Also, you want to have at least one set of photos somewhere you can print them conveniently. Free online photo storage sites are the ideal solution: not only do they give you a safe, off-site location to back up your precious photos, they give you an easy way to print your photographs—digital photo printing.
The best way to approach storing your photos safely is to use several approaches at the same time. For example, you may park them on a hard drive. That’s OK, but hard drives can fail. Sometimes it’s caused by something external, such as an electrical surge through your power lines, other times they just fail because they’re mechanical devices and entropy eventually wins. SO clearly you need another solution rather than putting all your eggs in one basket.
You may be clever enough to park them on more than one hard dive—physically separate hard drives, including an external one that can be put away. You still are at risk, as electrical conditions could fry both of them. It’s rare, but why take unnecessary chances? Find another backup method in addition to these. Some sort of permanent medium that you can’t erase is a good option. So you back up your photos on a long series of DVDRs. That’s good. But DVDRs will eventually deteriorate, even if you store them safely and do nothing to them. And what if something happens to your house or apartment? Clearly, your backup regimen should include some sort of off-site storage. This is where online gallery websites come in. you can upload all your photos there, and many give you unlimited storage space. There. That seems like a reasonable backup plan for all but the most paranoid.
Which leaves us with printing. If you chose carefully, you can get digital photo printing from your online photo gallery. That’s’ right, they can print high quality photos from your digital files and ship them to you or wherever you want. Online galleries are one of the highest quality, most economical options for online photo printing. The better online galleries use high-quality, Kodak photo paper, just like the kind of paper used for printing enlargements from film negatives optically. They use very good quality photo printers to get vibrant, clear, accurate color. Most free online photo storage services offer a variety of sizes to suit your printing needs as well. You can order prints in a variety of sizes, as well as in either glossy or matte finish, and using an easy online form can do all this. This type of service will ship your photos to you, or ship them anywhere you want. They’ll even expedite ‘em if you can’t wait.
