4.55 is the number of gigabytes I have used out of the 15GB that Google provides me for email, photos, documents, and blog posts. Although I resize my photos before uploading them to reduce storage use, the number in the title slowly but surely increases every week. At my present rate of posting, I expect to reach my cutoff point in a year or so.
Google used to boast that you would never have to delete an email because of unlimited storage and even offered unlimited uploads of optimised JPG files. But that changed and now each account holder gets a maximum of 15GB for free.
Not that I'm complaining. Server farms are expensive to build and maintain. It's unreasonable for me to expect Google to provide an infinite cloud drive in exchange for just allowing them to tell advertisers I have an interest in cats and cameras. (Strangely enough, I rarely see feline or photography related ads when using Google services. It's always some bloody K-Pop star being much too excited about drinking a beer or some sugary-cute Korean actress flirting around a bottle of soju).
But what happens when I reach my limit? I won't be able to upload more photos unless I delete earlier ones, and that would ruin previous posts. I could pay for extra storage, but blogging is not important enough to me to justify the cost. And, unless I pay forever, photos are going to eventually get deleted anyway. Switching to another free service is a possibility, but I've done that recently and most readers didn't follow. A less disruptive method would be to post just one quality photo a week and write about it in detail.
A method that avoids the problem altogether is joining a print exchange club, but a quick search shows that existing groups are mostly for people who do their own printing at home. I get my prints done at a lab, so that option is out for me. I suppose I could start my own group, but I'm not sure I have the energy to set it up and find members. And it could become quite expensive quite quickly if there is much interest. Also, Korea Post is still not sending airmail to a number of countries. So a print exchange club would have to wait until next year or later anyway.
I have just over 10GB of time left to consider a solution. Maybe a good idea will present itself and maybe it won't. Maybe I'll become an Instagrammer, horror of horrors(1). Maybe I'll lose interest in blogging in the meantime and the problem will solve itself.
(1) There's nothing wrong with Instagram, but I don't think a phone screen is a good place for serious sharing of photography.
I don't know what it costs to up your storage at Google, but Flickr is $50/year for unlimited storage. I use it to host the photos for my blog. No downsampling/downsizing of images, either - I upload the full image to Flickr.
ReplyDeleteI used Flickr for a while, but it's a bit of a hassle to link with Blogspot. But it's a possible backup plan if I run out of space on Google.
DeleteAt least you print your best photographs, Marcus, so you've a hard copy. Given that none of us are going to be around for ever I think that is the only option. No one, even close family, is going to want to sit at a computer and sift through gigabytes of photos. Picking up a self-published book or even looking through an archive box of photographs is a different thing altogether and much more likely to be done.
ReplyDeleteExcept for my wife, I have no one here in Korea. If she goes before me then it's the garbage pile for everything. Maybe I could donate a copy of my best prints to City Hall. They sometimes put out collections of photos submitted by residents. In twenty years perhaps Gangneung will have changed enough that my photos will be of some interest.
Delete