Imagine that you’ve taken some great digital pictures of a special event, uploaded them to Facebook and then deleted them from your camera and computer — only to realize that you’ve now lost the higher quality originals forever due to lack of an archive. That’s what’s happening to consumers who don’t realize that Facebook — and other sites that allow photo storage — doesn’t store images at their original quality.
Problems
This discovery is a huge problem for consumers, especially when you consider that Facebook has surpassed sites such as Flickr and even the old photo storage king Photobucket, in terms of most popular site for uploading photos. This isn’t surprising considering how much fun it can be to upload photos to Facebook and then tag your friends, which in turn prompts them to come comment on photos and reminisce about old times. However, people often don’t realize that they’ve lost their originals.
Now, when a friend wants a copy of a photo for themselves, to print out, what do you do? While the act of printing pictures has decreased significantly, with possibly as much as 40% of picture-taking households never printing photos, there still may be occasions where you want to print. If you don’t have the original digital image, you’re probably out of luck. Whatever version you have on a photosharing site or on Faceboook probably doesn’t have a high enough resolution to be printed at more than postcard size without being grainy. That means printing off 8″x10″ for an album, or larger images such as a poster for framing, are out of the question. Sure, there’s imaging software that can reconstruct some of the lost quality, but there are still limits.
Image Storage Options
Even with Facebook announcing earlier this month that they would save uploaded images at about a 20% size increase, it’s still not the same as having a high-resolution copy available when you need it. If you’ve already deleted your original digital image files, you’re probably out of luck, unless you want to get very technically-savvy and scrape your hard drive to see if the files are still around. For the future, you can save your digital images before you upload them to Facebook or some photo-sharing site. Here are some of your digital archival options:
- Memory cards. Keep digital image files on their original memory cards and keep a library of cards. Memory cards are much cheaper these days, and even the smallest can hold a significant number of high-resolution photos.
Drawback: Memory cards can get erased or lost, and are hard to label. - DVD or CD. Burn image files to a DVD or CD. They’re cheap, easy to label, easy to share.
Drawback: Unless you take a lot of pictures at once, discs have more space than you need, and often you end up wasting it. - Internal drive. Store files image files on your computer’s internal hard drive. This gives you easy access to do image editing and create digital photo albums.
Drawback: Your hard drive stands to get filled up quickly. - External drive. Store files to an external hard drive. These are getting cheaper and larger in capacity, and often work cross-platform (that is, can function on a PC, Linux or Mac OS X computer).
Drawback: They tend to be slower than internal hard drives. - Cloud storage. Store files to a “cloud storage” service. There are multiple options for file storage services online, and many offer freemium options — free under a certain storage capacity. For example, Dropbox offers up to 2GB free, with space bonuses each time anyone you refer completes registration and activates their “dropbox.” Dropbox and other services even act as if they’re a folder on an external hard drive, making it easy to drag and drop files.
Drawback: Some of these services have an unexpected “drag and drop” behavior. Be sure to note whether you’re creating a new copy or not, when dragging the original to its cloud target. Experiment with unimportant sample files.
Many of the above options can also benefit from having photo sets compressed with a “ZIP” type of application. This is of course only useful if you are truly archiving your digital photos and don’t expect to edit or otherwise manipulate them any time soon. If some of your images are very important, you might use multiple options from above.
Do you share a lot of photos on Facebook? Do you preserve the original digital images? If so, how do you store them? Let us know in the comments.
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I store them on Shutterfly. They keep the original resolution and I can order prints and photo books of those pictures in full, high resolution.
Comment by Facebook User — March 17, 2010 @ 10:09 am
I store mine on a cd/dvd. Have tried multiple ways and many of them somehow manage to get lost. They REALLY have a way of evaporating on a jump drive. Learned that the HARD way!
Comment by Raynetta Drinnon — March 17, 2010 @ 10:31 am
It would be great if there was a tool that synced with your facebook albums and stored them off facebook in case anything ever happened to them (i.e., deleted account, etc.)
Comment by George Gayl — March 17, 2010 @ 10:33 am
I do photo storage overkill. I like my Facebook albums because they are nice compilation albums, similar to the old days when I'd just pick a select few for a real photo album. But also just like the old days, that means I have MANY more pictures that don't make the "cut." I have all my photos, the good and the bad, stored in many places. Two hard drives (home and work,) yearly CDs (you don't have to save to a CD every time you take a few pics; wait a while,) and on Kodakgallery.com. And a lot of times I DO delete originals that I know without a shadow of a doubt have no future printing potential (how many of your photos, REALLY, will you want to make into an 8X10 out of?) This whole risk of losing original files "problem" has another view…back in the day, film was expensive and time consuming to get developed, so you were VERY careful about the photos you took to begin with. Now, with digital photography and everyone having some form of digital camera, people snap random photos 24/7. It doesn't take long to realize that the majority of those photos are throw-aways.
Comment by Ally — March 17, 2010 @ 10:33 am
Fotki.com is having a sale on premium (unlimited storage) accounts for 99 cents/mo.
Also, FacePAD (Facebook Photo Album Downloader) extension for Firefox can save whole albums at once. (Disclosure: FacePAD author is my friend).
Comment by Facebook User — March 17, 2010 @ 11:00 am
We have the solution for Facebook and its members, it will be available soon in the US, however VP's at Facebook will most likely be difficult to reach, our product was designed for this purpose and with Facebook in mind. We are in hopes they will respond to our request, however as mentioned getting their attention may be difficult.
Comment by Edward Castanuela — March 17, 2010 @ 11:04 am
That's great, but I think that many of us might like to have these pictures available outside of facebook as well don't we? Then what about an application that actually enables you to save your facebook pictures on your hard drive?
Im looking for an applicaiton that does so, Is there any?
Thanks in advance for your answer
Comment by timdl — March 17, 2010 @ 2:06 pm
+1 Shutterfly.
Also, Costco online.
Comment by anonymous — March 17, 2010 @ 2:31 pm
I love using Creative Memories Memory Manager for backing up my photos. It not only edits, and organizes photos, but it makes it easy with an automatic shadow copy. It works well in cooperation with another software from CM called StoryBook Creator Plus, that makes pages, books, pdfs and more. It even has a share feature so digital pages can be uploaded to facebook. The resolution of screen shots (as facebook stores them) doesn't make for good prints or enlargements. Having a system that's easy, and works great WITH Facebook is one of the perks of the software.
Comment by Nancy Smith — March 17, 2010 @ 5:04 pm
Thanks for the helpful suggestions. I really need to get my images organized . . . and soon!
Comment by Mary Feryan — March 17, 2010 @ 5:16 pm
I archive my photos online with Heritage Makers – http://www.easytomakebooks.com – where I can also create books, greeting cards, calendars and more with them. I am able to store, download original resolution copies and share my photos with friends.
Comment by Patricia Simmons Gla — March 17, 2010 @ 6:12 pm
I think my FB pics are just 1% of my photo collection. So while backup of FB photos isn't a concern, but your post reminded me how disorganized I have keeping my photos together. Need to put together a backup plan…
Comment by Satyajit Sahu — March 17, 2010 @ 6:44 pm
$20 buys you 80GB of Google storage. I use Picasa to arrange all my pics and to upload to Facebook (using the plugin). With the extra storage, and the options in Picasa set to 'upload in original size/res' I can automatically sync all my pictures to Google's storage, with the added benefit of being able to view them in full res from any website, and also via the CoolIris gallery on my Nexus One…
Comment by Webreaper — March 17, 2010 @ 11:45 pm
Re comment above about a tool that syncs you photos to your computer from Facebook, have a look at our product SocialSafe at http://www.socialsafe.net. It downloads your photos, wall posts, and a lot more all at the click of a button – and all Facebook legal and inexpensive too.
Comment by Julian Ranger — March 18, 2010 @ 12:43 am
I store a backup of my gallery on http://www.fotki.com – a bunch of uploading tools (I use FTP) and nice prices.
Comment by John Niesner — March 18, 2010 @ 3:21 am
If you upload your pictures to Photobucket, you can easily share them to facebook to share with friends and still store them on Photobucket forever. http://photobucket.com
Comment by Luke — March 18, 2010 @ 7:46 am
Help me please. My hard drive has been wiped and all my pictures are gone. I have some stored on a usb, but not many. However I have uploaded loads in the past to face book and thought that I would be able to get them from there, however when I create a jp file for them they come out really small and grainy, when I increase the size of them they distort to the point where you cant make out whats happening in them. Is there any way that I can get them from FB and get them looking almost normal again?
Comment by carin laird — May 24, 2010 @ 3:56 am
Terrible article. This is a short list of places to upload photos, not how to archive all your facebook photos and albums.
Comment by Anonymous — September 25, 2011 @ 11:42 am