Where to Put it All

I'm facing a digital media conundrum: I've got thousands of megabytes of photos I need to ahve stored in a public place, but I don't want to pay for the right to do so.

Flickr? For free, I can store 100 mb a month. Same at Photobucket. If I want unlimited storage, well, I have to pay for it. Minimum $25 a year. I know that sounds terribly piggy and selfish that I don't want to have to pay for storage, but you know what? The Internet has taught me that free is good.

Going to try an experiment tonight. Via Blogger (and Google) I have access to something called Picasa Web Albums. Apparently, I can store 1,024 mb for free. When it all comes down to it, however, when it comes to digital storage, 1,024 mb isn't all that much space. I've got about 260 photos of our recent campout to Meadow Lake that I'd like to store somwhere, but that computes out to about 1,300 mb of data. I'm already hogging 164 mb in my Picasa allotment with photos and junk I've uploaded to my blogs, so I could easily clog Picasa with just one additional photo album.

Maybe another option: Facebook. They let me store lots of photos. But are they stored at the size that is needed on the other end -- I'm doing this for Uncharted, and Uncharted wants the raw images, hugely huge; to describe their vastness would do them a disservice. (Start at about 0:53, just for fun; watch out for a little bad language that passes quickly in the night.)

We've got this problem, see. We used to run an FTP site for Uncharted, and that was handy, until our Ruby on Rails host told us that was a no-no. So we've been using one of our teammembers' Mac Mobile Me gallery, which works up to the point it doesn't. For the past two weeks, mysteriously, I've been unable to upload photos to said gallery, causing no amount of frustration. No one seems to be able to explain why -- though our Digital Bridge/Idaho internet is the most likely suspect (I'm so tired of bad high-speed Internet service I could scream).

I should probably break down and get a pro Flickr account. Maybe I can squeeze $25 out of the money I get for teaching a class next semester . . .