Flickr it seems is dead. They got taken over by somebody. Today I went to access some photos I'd taken some 3 years ago to be greeted with a message that I had to cough up money or lose images. Thank the Lord everything is backed up somewhere. This is just like one of those other image banks that vanished a few years ago so abruptly that people could not save their images and lots of people lost a lot of precious photos.
It goes back to what I've always said about online anything. It could all disappear in the blink of an eye. A server goes down mid backup, corrupting the data files and the backups. Then a fire breaks out in the backup room and takes out all the historical backups leaving everybody with nothing.
An image format might cease to be used. In a few years nobody will support that format. Then you go back to your old photos that you've not seen in 20 years and bang - they're there - you just can't access them.
Where do you go from here? Well, fortunately USB memory sticks are plentiful and cheap. Store all your images on memory sticks. Make multiple copies but crucially - label them. The problem though is that like VHS cassettes, nobody is going to check through VHS cassettes before discarding them. They're not like film or cine film where you can hold them up to the light to see exactly what's on them. I've seen people throw out huge piles of VHS cassettes with no idea what was on them. There could have been anything from their baby footage to their graduation.
In the old days flash memory was ludicrously expensive. I remember spending a ton on 8MB memory cards. Then I remember spending $100 on a 1GB CF card. Now I can pick up massive memory cards for very little money. It used to make sense to store your photos on a hard drive and recycle the memory card. Now it makes more sense to keep your photos on the memory cards and duplicate them onto memory sticks then store the originals away safely.
As far as this online stuff is concerned, Flickr was free. That should be the first warning that it wasn't kosher. Never rely upon anything free. As far as the pictures I have on Flickr - I couldn't give a rat's arse. That was just a display medium for me. If Google photos went down then I would grumble but I'd still have all my photos. I don't think I bother with iPhoto.
Never store anything online that you don't have a backup of.
No comments:
Post a Comment