on line photo storage?

[snoozealot]

hi i'd be grateful for any top tips. have been spring cleaning our laptop in the hope of freeing up some HD - have 1000's of photos and video clips just sitting on it - think I should try and use drop box or photobucket, but I'm just a bit..... scared of it, in that it seems a bit beyond my limited techy abilities. we don't have ipad or anything like that. also what to do with all these photos? get emails from companies that offer to produce photo books etc., and thinking of getting a couple of these done as a gift from grandparents. has anyone used these and does it take ages? is it good value?

OK. Firstly find out how much diskspace all your photos & videos are taking up. You can do this by right clicking on the folder and choosing properties. If you have them in separate folders, do this for each folder.

Do you have a backup somewhere? If not, I urge you to buy an external device like this one: Seagate 500GB. Copy all your photos & videos to it now. Unfortunately hard disks die and lots of people have found this out the hard way. The last thing you want is to lose your photos.

Next thing is to decide what you want to do with the photos? Simple backup? Share with friends? If it's backups, Dropbox is free for 2GB and you can pay for more. Google Drive gives you 5GB for free which should be enough for most casual users I suspect.

If you want to share then services like Photobucket are better.

As for photobooks they are good but do take a while to design. The software can be quite fiddly. I find the Jessops one very good and they always seem to be giving money off codes. They do take some time to come. 1-2 weeks usually. I've started to order the photo quality paper version since I find the normal one is poor quality. If you look closely at the photos, you can see the dots building up the photo. To be fair most people are not bothered but I'm a semi-pro photographer so this bothers me no end.

Hope that helps

thanks very much niceguy2, am copying some precious files to pen drive as i type! great advice thank you and i'll be checking out the jessops photo books

Glad I can help. The other advantage with the Jessop photobooks is that you can go into a store and have a look/feel of the quality.

I use Flickr free if you dont want a large upload think it was 17 quid this year for the flickr pro,

I have hundreds of photos and really wanted them stored digitally but the idea of scanning them all brought me out in a cold sweat. A friend recommended a company to me but not sure what they were called. I'll check my emails and see if I can find the name.

They are called Scandango but after reading your OP properly I see you were cleaning up your laptop and not your loft!!!! Major mis-reading from me there