If you regularly read my blog, you probably realize that I take a lot of photos. Because of the advent of the digital camera, I went from an extremely occasional photographer to being somewhat obsessed with capturing everything. Hell, it’s not uncommon for me to take more than a hundred photos before lunch. What can I say? C is a cutie pie. And I like being the one to memorialize anything, as long as I care about the people. And as long as everyone realizes that just because I like taking pictures doesn’t mean I’m good at it. I guess I should take a class.

Anyway, the problem is that I have nearly twenty gigabytes of photographs on this computer, and this computer only has a 110 gig hard drive. I do send all of my photos to smugmug, but I’ve never been comfortable with deleting them after I upload them, even though I know they’d send them back to me on dvd if I wanted it (and gave them $). Plus, smugmug stores their files on Amazon’s servers, so it’s not like they’re not with a trustworthy name. Still, I just can’t bring myself to do what I need to do.

And I don’t want to buy an external harddrive, because I don’t want to lay down $100 on something that could easily fail or be stolen. Or be dropped. It seems like a safer bet to spend money on “the cloud” taking care of your storage for you.

So that’s why I signed up for a Jungle Disk account a few weeks ago. They’ve got a nifty feature where you can use their service as a network drive. As long as you’re online, your data stored on the network drive will feel like it’s on your computer. Abracadabra, presto chango, no need to keep storing stuff forever on your harddrive. Instead, my photos are stored twice on the cloud, once by Amazon and once by Rackspace.

The funny thing is it’s still hard to ditch the hard drive, and I’ve yet to do it. I think it’s because I feel better knowing I can see the drive my stuff is on, even though it might not be the best place for it.

I just need to make that leap, right?

Ever since I signed up with SmugMug (highly recommended!), I’ve been working to reorganize my/Katie’s photos. I’ve gone through about five thousand photos in two months, going backwards from this year, and it’s been wonderful not only to feel better organized but also to remember good times.

Like the time I shaved off my beard (briefly) so Katie could see my face before we got married.

Beardless Jon in 2006

beardful Jon in 2008

And yes, I did have long sideburns. The only thing I miss about not having a beard was having fun sideburns. They were bold, but they were me.

The site with the stupid name.

Anyway, flickr has some really good features, such as easy sharing and unlimited uploads and bandwidth for only $25 a year. But it has some pretty big negatives, too. It doesn’t have a lot of customizability, for example, and the organizing features are just terrible. I spent an hour yesterday trying to tag photos that were supposed to have been uploaded into a folder and weren’t. And at the end of tagging dozens and dozens of photos, I had four photos that were correctly tagged.

Anyway, we’ll see how this goes. I have a fourteen day trial. All I know is there’s got to be something better out there than flickr. If it looks worth it, there are several tools for importing your flickr pictures. Obviously I’ll want to try them before paying!

Edit: here’s a pretty cool article about the family business.