After the Webshots fiasco I switched to saving all my pictures to folders on my desktop and then save them to an external hard drive as I don't trust the hosting sites including Google Photo's where I have many pictures after they axed Picaso. This works remarkably well for me and I don't have to worry about the host messing around making changes behind the scene unannounced.
Doug’s recommendation of an external hard drive makes much sense, especially if you have suffered through various photo hosting sites going belly up and leaving folks in the lurch. To wit:
Community Webshots was a popular photo hosting site for paddlers. I have several dozen trip albums on Webshots, with captions, a couple thousand photos in all. One well known paddler had hundreds of trips, photo essays and sequential tutorial how-to’s on Webshots, all with captions. Webshot was eventually sold to Hallmark Greeting Cards.
Soon after the sale Webshots simply pulled the plug. If you acted fast enough you managed to get all of your photos back. As a jumbled mass, not in albums, without any captions. I still have a thumb drive with thousands of trip photos, in no order. Thanks a bunch Hallmark, you could at least have sent me a “Sorry for your loss” sympathy card.
Some Webshots users migrated to PhotoBucket, me included; another couple thousand photos uploaded. Photobucket didn’t simply shut down; they held the photos, for lack of a better word, for ransom. IE, $400 a year if you wanted to be able to 3[SUP]rd[/SUP] party post photos. That was a big FU for my wallet.
Some folks then migrated to Flickr. I had downloaded another (I know the number) 1700 photos onto a Flickr account, before Flickr decided to cap the free hosted photos at 1000, and delete older ones as newer ones over the 1K limited were uploaded.
Or pay $50 a year for an unlimited Flickr “Pro” account. Yeah, sure, ok, that’s more reasonable, ya got me; I’m not losing everything again. I am not convinced that yearly fee will not rise, or Flickr someday sell out and pull the plug.
Long way of saying that photos loaded to an external hard drive make a lot of sense. And that I do not trust any photo hosting site. Not even Google.
That adage that “Anything you put on the net lives on forever” doesn’t apply to photo hosting sites.