Choosing Photo Hosting

So, I've been using Sony's Imagestation for years and I found out the other day they are closing and shutting down their servers. Their service was awesome - you pay hardly anything (a yearly fee that I can't even remember how much it was and I still consider myself right out of college - ramen baby) and you get:

• unlimited storage
• access to the original images
• and cheap prints (like $0.10/print)

When they announced they were closing, they offered to transfer all of my images (which was many gigs worth) to Shutterfly. Now, Shutterfly is a nice service, but:

• no access to original images
• expensive prints (~$0.20/print, almost double what Imagestation offered)

From this, my search for a replacement image host began. I was ready to spend some amount of money each year to host my images. I came up with the following requirements for choosing a host service:

1. Must have unlimited storage (they existed before with Imagestation and I can't go back to being limited)
2. Must take responsibility for storing the images and have backups of my data in case something happens to my backups.
3. Must have access to the original images and not just be able to do prints. If I lose my local original images, how could I ever get the originals back?

In addition to the above, I also wanted a host whose primary focus was hosting photos for consumers. I didn't want a stock photo or public image sharing host - specifically photo hosting for home users.

So, I compiled this list of top considered photo services:

Service	Yearly Cost	Cons	Extra Features
SmugMug	$39.95/year	Expensive prints;	Web2.0 galleries; Open API;
Fotki	$50/year	No open API	Upload via FTP;
Flickr	$24.95/year		Open API;

[UPDATE: 12/11/2007]

So, after thinking about it a bit, Flickr seemed to be the best option. I chose it because:

1. They have unlimited storage and bandwidth,
2. They are very popular and backed by Yahoo so they aren't going anywhere any time soon,
3. They have a very open API which allows for many different applications and means of accessing my photos.
4. It's relatively cheap - $25/year isn't bad.

You can see my public photos here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/nedarb760/

New blogging tool

This is awesome. I found this tool one day while reading some articles on LifeHacker. It's Microsoft's Windows Live Writer. You can read about it on the Live Writer web site but it's basically a GUI for writing blog entries for a number of blogging services. Blogger is one of them and so far it seems like a really nice tool.

UPDATE: I originally installed this on a Windows XP SP2 machine and when I tried it on my Vista x64 laptop, it didn't work. The work-around can be found here. Microsoft officially does not support running any of the Live programs on 64-bit machines, but they will run in 32-bit mode. You can read more about it on the blog post I linked to.