Last week I wrote a post that skirted over the issue of backing up your digital memories on-line.

I cant say enough how important it is that you consider a solution for keeping these precious memories safe.

Now Google’s Picasa is a great way to manage your pictures. You  can catalogue, tag and upload your photo albums online. You can even choose from a dozen photo effects. Picasa is great and its free.

Now if you have a Google account (also free) they give you 1gb of storage on Picasa Web Albums.

1gb for free is generous and as you need more Google will offer you additional storage at fixed price points.

I chose the 10gig plan at $20 a year. 

I really get two things for my money.

1) Off site backup.

2) The ability to share web albums online. The system will give you links that contain authentication codes that are unique to you and would not be easy to guess. From an ease of use perspective this is fantastic.

In terms of backup I still recommend you keep two copies locally. One on a PC and one on an external hard disk.

You don’t want to be the digital curator having to explain why you lost the irreplaceable.

The Picasa uploader seems very robust, I pointed it at a local folder with 866 photo’s and left it going and it uploaded all of them successfully.

Tip: In Picasa Web Albums you can have up to 1000 photo’s in each album, this is great for uploading but when looking at albums online this can be a problem. So a smaller number like 200 might be better.

When I looked at who offered online backup for photo’s I trusted Google’s Picasa more than Microsoft’s SkyDrive or the Yahoo owned Flickr. If you don’t like Picasa then I would say Flickr would be your next best bet.

Link: Picasa

This entry was posted on Monday, February 18th, 2008 at 7:56 am and is filed under Blog Entries, Consumer Reviews, Recommended Downloads, Tech Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.