This is the one area in my life where Google doesn’t own me.  Online photo gallery.  Now don’t get me wrong.  I love Picasa and Picasa web.  But there is one thing about them that prevents me from using it and that is storage space.  1 gig is all they offer for free.  1 gig?!?  Do you realize that I have over 45 gigs of pictures?  So 1 gig is good for a free service.  You know how much it costs to upgrade the storage?  For 10 gigs it’s $20 a year, which still wouldn’t be enough to store my photos.  For 40 gigs it’s $75 a year, which yet again wouldn’t store all my photos.  For 150 gigs, it costs $250.  $250 a year to store my photos if I were to use them.  What’s worse about this storage upgrade is that it shares that store with Gmail as well.  So if you have 1 gig worth of email, like I do, then you have 1 gig less of storage for photos.  Picasa web…  Not worth the money.

Flickr, in my opinion, is a much better option.  The free version is kind of limited, but it works well.  But for a mere $25 a year, you get unlimited storage, unlimited uploads, unlimited bandwidth, etc…  So if I wanted to store my photos here, it’ll cost my $25 a year.  That’s a tenth of the price for me than Picasa.  The features of Picasa and Flickr are different, and I think Picasa is better.  But that storage absolutely is dog doo doo.  This would be a no brainer for me…  if it weren’t for my stupid internet connection.

Do you realize that I still only have 1.5 Mbps / 384 Kbps DSL?  Do you know that’s the fastest speed I can get at my house?  Yes, there is cable internet here.  But if you know me and Charter, then you know that’s not an option. So let’s do a little calculation here on how long it would take to transfer.

In reality I really only get about 35 KB/s max upload rate.  I normally limit the upload rate to 25KB/s so it doesn’t kill my connection.  45 GB = 45,000,000 KB.  With my connection maxed out, it would take me over 357 hours to finish or almost 15 days to finish transferring my photos.  With my upload rate capped, it would take 500 hours, or 20.8 days to finish transferring my pictures.   Now if I had FiOS and my 15 Mb uplink, I’d be able to finish that transfer in 400 minutes, or just under 7 hours.  Who needs FiOS?  I do.

Where is my FiOS, Verizon?  I have been waiting patiently for years for you to come to my house, and you are still not here!  Come now!