There's a lot of websites out there that offer you free hosting for your photos, but unfortunately, most of them don't offer a lot of space. For example, my new-ish photo album website, available from the link on the right, only allows me to store 30 Mb of photos. This isn't a lot really. If you post 20 photos a month, at 100kb each, that's 2 Mb a month. In 15 months you'll have run out of space, and then you're screwed.

So I've had my eye open for something better. I found it.

www.zoto.com

It allows you to store up to 2 Gb (2,000 Mb for those of you who don't know what a Gb is). At 100 kb per photo, that's up to... well, let me show you this little example:

100 kb per photo
x 10 photos = 1,000 kb = 1 Mb
x 100 photos = 10,000 kb = 10 Mb
x 1,000 photos = 10,0000 kb = 100 Mb
x 10,000 photos = 1,000,000 kb = 1000 Mb = 1 Gb

So 2 Gb will allow you to store 20,000 photos. If you store 20 photos per month, at 100kb per photo, that means it will take 83 years to reach a 2 Gb storage limit. Impressive hey?

And storage limits are only going to get bigger as time goes by, and hard drives become cheaper and therefore more available.

The only concern I have, and one which will always ensure I have a backup on my computer or CD / DVD, is that the online photo host goes out of business or there's an extreme server crash where all data is lost forever. Or the world goes to hell and everything dies....

I can just imagine me, sitting there in the dark, looking at the powerless laptop, and the CDs and DVDs marked 'Photos', wishing I could see those photos one more time before I die...

Ah... the good ol' days of printed photos and real photo albums that you could drag out of the cupboard and go through when you're feeling nostalgic.

Would you believe that I still have every single photo I've taken in my entire life, in photo albums (the book kind) or still in the envelope from the photo printing shop. They're in a couple of boxes. Every now and again I look through them with nostalgia for the past.

I hope we have electricity forever. If we don't, I've got 5 or so years of photos in digital format that will be lost forever.

The future, while exciting in its promise, is also terrifying for everything we can lose if it all fails.