| The problem is hosting your photos with OpenPhotoProject would cost more. With a Flickr Pro account, for $2 per month you can upload an unlimited number of photos. Well, I'm sure there are limits, but I uploaded 8,000 full resolution pictures on it in only a couple of days and it didn't complain. Also my collection is growing like crazy ever since I became a father. So the whole collection is like 32 GB. On Amazon S3 that would cost me $4.48 per month just for the storage. Managing it, like uploading new ones or deleting from it would also bring additional costs. I'm also starting to make movies, so I'm sure my collection will double in size pretty soon. So that would be $8.96 per month. And it won't stop there. The only cheap alternative to Flickr would be Google's Picassa. You can purchase 80 GB of storage for $20 per year, or $1.6 per month. Also 1 TB of pictures would cost on Google $256 per year, while on S3 it would be $1720 per year. Personally I'm not interested in showing off my work to the world. I'm only interested in storing those pictures somewhere in case I need a backup or in case I want to access them from a remote location. Flickr is great for both, too bad that Yahoo is killing it. |
That's sort of the point though. $2/month is cheap but the actual cost is the 4 years you probably spent uploading and tagging photos only to have the service die.
Your options are continue using a service you don't like for a great price or start using something else and leave behind the 4 years of organization (which you need with 8,000 photos).
It's kinda like the free hit crack dealers give out. In the end it's not worth it. Trust me, I've been there in a previous life.
That being said, Amazon S3 isn't required. You can install it yourself and point it to your NAS.