One of the few sites I regularly upload my own photographs to is Flickr, as a matter of fact it’s the only site to which I upload all the images I put online. I use it as both storage and as a form of ‘sketch book’. Using the ‘sets’ facility is a great way to organize your photographs for your own reference.
The site offers a huge amount of storage absolutely free, and they claim the 1TB is enough to store about 500,000 images at full size. I’d perhaps debate the number they quote, but whether it’s correct or not, give or take a few thousand – that’s a lot of pictures! If you only use it for back-up for your favourite photographs it’s worth signing up for that alone! If your computer gets fried or your house burns down you’ll still have your images at full resolution available to you, and unlike the likes of Dropbox (free file storage up to 2GB) they will be easy to view and you won’t be paying for the space!
The real beauty of the site though lies in the levels of flexibility and privacy it offers…
- You can make all or some of your images visible to whoever you want, be that just yourself, ‘friends’ on the site, or the wider world.
- You can make your photographs searchable, or hide them from site searches and search engines.
- You can choose who is able to download or copy your images and prevent them from being downloaded. Of course nothing is impossible if someone really wants to steal your work, but in terms of security I believe Flickr is about as good as it gets.
- You have full control over who can share your photographs on social networks, and on which social networks they are able to share them.
- You can embed directly into your own site, and allow others to embed in theirs if you wish.
- You can connect with other users (if that’s your thing – it’s not mine) through making friend connections and participating in groups as on many popular social networks.
- You can allow people to allow licensing of your images through Getty Images if you wish.
Here’s what you get for free (at the time of writing)…
- 1 TB of photo and video storage
- Upload photos of up to 200 MB each
- Upload videos of up to 1GB each
- Video playback of up to 3 minutes each
- Unlimited original downloads of your photos
What’s not to love!
