hendrikch.com – Hendrik Christian Blog on Daily Life

Few months back, Sony announced their online photo sharing site, Imagestation, will be closed. That came as a big blow to me, as I have backed up all my photos since 1999 with them, over 25,000 photos at over 33 GB. All my photos during my university days and working days until now are all there. All my families photos and all those travels are all there. I have used it as my second backup. I have a full set in my main hard drive, and another set in my external hard disk. If there is anything that I cannot lose from my PC, this is it. I can lose installer files, some documents, it’s fine, but not my family and my photo collections, they are irreplaceable. I’m sure you agree with me on this.

My current “My Pictures” folder size

Warning: Tech talk below, but if you are interested how to backup your ever-increasing photo collections online, read on.

Imagestation announced they’ll move all my photos to another site, Shutterfly, for free. That’s cool, I thought in the first place, until I found out that I couldn’t access my original-sized photos in Shutterfly. I contacted their customer service, and they said that they don’t provide original-sized photos because of technical reason. What??!! When I upload a full 5MP photo into Shutterfly, you tell me 640×480 photo is the only one I’ll ever get? C’mon, be serious. Yeah, they are serious, they don’t provide it. Sad.

And, here I am, looking for a new host for all my photos, and I’m ready to pay for it. I know no free site will host my 30GB photos for free, none. I’ve done some researched over the past one week. PicasaWeb looks good and easy, Flickr is popular though un-organized, but my choice in the end came to either Fotki or Smugmug. Picasa came with free 1GB storage, and it’s $20/year for 10GB or $75/year for 40GB. That’s expensive, and very limited compared to the rest of the competitors. Flickr, on the other hand, offer $24.95/year for the pro account, for unlimited storage, but it’s messy. The only way you can organize your photos is by sets and tags, and that’s messy to me.

Come Fotki and Smugmug, two very well known photo sharing site. Fotki currently offers $30/year for unlimited storage for its Premium account. What drives me to Fotki is its ability to allow FTP access. With FTP access, it’ll be so easy to upload your photos, and to download them in the future should I need it. It allows you to create folders, subfolders, sub-subfolders, and so on, to organize your albums of photos. That’s much better than Flickr‘s. I can easily organize by year, by month, by events, etc. Next competitor is Smugmug, I am currently on their 14-days free trial of Standard accounts. I still have 10 days left to try out their services. A standard account costs $40, the most expensive of all (not considering PicasaWeb), but its features and potential beats the rest. Firstly, it provides an open API, basically an open programming language, so anyone can write any utilities, applications to interface with Smugmug. The result are impressive, there are a number of free applications out there that allow you to upload, download, and do many things with your Smugmug account. ACDSee, which I use, offers Smugmug plugin with their latest ACDSee 10 Photo Manager. Secondly, it allows better organization like Fotki, albeit only two levels, but that’s enough. You can have keywords as you would expect, but you can create ShareGroups, which can turn out to be useful.

For example, the way I categorize my albums is by years and months. Subsequently, I can create ShareGroups that is called “Church“, and pick all the photo galleries across those years and months that has church outings and activities, and I can share that link with my church friends. That way, they’ll see only photos that matter to them, not every single activities of my life in 2007, for example. If there isn’t any major issue I find with Smugmug, I’ll likely sign up for their service before my trial expires.

Anyway, if you happen to like to sign up for a Smugmug account yourself, you can use my referral code and enter it, when you sign up, into Smugmug voucher coupon code: C26cqbAfqMjWs. I’ll earn $10 for my next year’s subscription, and you’ll earn $5 yourself, paying $35 instead of $40. Definitely not much, but it’s a win-win really. Do you use any online photo sharing/backup site? Where do you keep them?

Apparently Google Groups has its limit. I don’t know how many messages were posted when the ‘warning’ from Google came, but I remember few months back, we posted around 2,200 emails per day , and haven’t got this message from Google yet. Oh yes, the group is very very very super highly active with emails  And no, I don’t read all of the emails. 2,200 emails (assuming I can read each email within 5 seconds) will last me more than 6 hours to finish them all. Here is the email from Google that we received I wonder if any of you have ever joined such active group before, hehehe….  

---

Hello xxxxx@gmail.com, Your message could not be posted to the indonesian gmail group because there
have been too many messages posted to the group recently.
In order to protect the Google Groups service, and the mailboxes of the
members of the indonesian gmail group, we limit the number of messages that
can be posted per hour to the group.
Please try posting your message later.
If you have questions related to this or any other Google group, please visit
the Help Center at http://groups-beta.google.com/support .
Thanks,
The Google Groups Team
================================================= From Google Groups Help Center
Is there a limit on how often I can post? Yes, there are two ways in which posting frequency is limited. The first limits the number of messages posted to a single group within a short period of time. If that limit is reached, posting to that group will be frozen temporarily and you’ll be instructed to post again later.
The second limits the number of messages a single user can post in a short period of time. If that limit is reached, your posting account will be disabled. If your account has been disabled, you can click the “contact us” link below and request that your account be reactivated. We’ll review your request, and let you know what we decide.
Please note, we are unable to provide the exact numbers that trigger
these posting limits.

First thing first, Google has recently announced plans to double the amount of storage space in Gmail to 2GB. The increase appears to have already begun. Mine now is 1103 MB and increasing by the minute. Only 5 minutes ago it was 1100 MB.
Second thing, since today’s April Fool, so, I don’t know if everything will be back to 1000 MB tomorrow morning. We’ll see.
And oh, now it’s 1105 MB.
Update: If you go to Gmail’s homepage (you need to sign out first if you are signed in), you’ll see their top secret Infinity+1 storage plan with a counter of the storage space they are giving now. Also, they now support Rich Text formatting for email, no more plain text, hahaha…. at last… *excited* To see what has just been launched by Google, check Gmail’s What’s New page. For my space, now it’s 1112 MB.
Update 2: It seems Gmail space is increasing at a rate of 10.24 KB per second. That’s exactly 0.01 MB per second. Going at that rate, we will hit roughly 1413 MB by midnight Singapore time. Now it’s at 1138 MB.
Update 3: Now we have passed the 2048 MB (2 GB) mark, Google continues to give us more email space, albeit in much slower rate now. If I don’t count wrongly, it’s roughly 0.1 KB per 3 seconds, equals to 2.88 KB per minute. Interestingly, this calculates to 1 GB in one year. How about that? By 1 April 2006, I reckon, our Gmail space would have been 3072 MB.
Incidentally, this is my 200th post in my blog, since almost one year ago, 18 April 2004. Averaging one post every two days, not bad.

Only two days ago I was talking to my roommate, telling him that I wished Google can predict what we would like to search, providing a drop down list of possible search keywords. My roommate told me that it will be impossible as Google has billion of pages to index and providing a suggestion from those billion of words are simply impossible. I thought so too.
Well, the impossible has become the possible, Google has came out with Google Suggest that will try to guess what users are looking for as they type queries into a search box. Cool stuff. You can try the link at http://www.google.com/webhp?complete=1&hl=en.

After Google Search and Google Mail (Gmail), could we be expecting Google Browser (Gbrowser) or Google Instant Messaging (GIM) anytime soon?
As for Gbrowser, rumours flew around the Web about Google’s potential plans to release a Web browser.

These rumours have been fuelled by a number of high-profile hires that Google has made, including various people who worked on Microsoft Internet Explorer, added to the fact that Google Inc. has registered the domain name gbrowser.com until April 2006.
Ah well, we’ll see… but for the moment, there’s always alternative to Internet Explorer, such as ever-wonderful Opera and Firefox. I am using both Opera and Firefox daily, only using Internet Explorer if I really really have to. I suggest you follow suit.
Update: I actually forgot to mention that Google currently has more than just Search and Mail. They currently have Google News, Google Groups, Google Toolbar, Google Blog (Blogger), and Google “Friendster” (Orkut) as well. Anything else I miss?

I started using Gmail (new free web-based email from Google) on 21 June 2004 and as today, I have already used 16% of the space. 161 MB to be exact. I followed Gmail recommendation to “Archive, don’t Delete” for nearly every single email I received, and I am now surprised to have used 161 MB in less than a month. Prior to using Gmail, I uses my work email address and still delete emails that I does not want already, as what we always did. I filled up the 85 MB space in 3.5 months.
Now with the “Archive, don’t Delete” approach, I filled up the same amount of space SEVEN times as fast. I told my friend when I started, calculating from my previous track record, if I uses 85 MB in 3.5 months, 1000 MB should last me near to 3.5 years which is good.
However, with the new track record with Gmail, that 1000 MB can only lasts me six months, which is NOT good. Granted, there are a hell lot of junk inside, but that’s what Gmail wanted in the first place, isn’t it? Frankly, there may be less than 10 MB of emails that I wanted to keep in there. I think Gmail should start considering changing their approach and make it easier for us to delete emails. Who needs to archive junks after all?

Well, they are certainly fighting it out now that MSN Hotmail joined the ring as well. Microsoft said Wednesday that it will boost storage limits in its Hotmail Web e-mail service, a move intended to counter similar steps taken by rivals Google and Yahoo.

The upgrade will increase Hotmail’s free e-mail storage limits from 2 megabytes to 250MB and its paid e-mail service, which costs $19.95 a year, from 10MB to 2 gigabytes. The changes will begin in early July.
Great, now my email address will soon be added by another 248 MB of space.  [+]
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