Your Vacation Photos May Be Lost Forever
You have probably seen more vacation photos in the past seven years that in your entire lifetime beforehand, thanks to Facebook.
People used to take their photos on vacation with a disposable camera, and then either put the developed photos is a ‘photo album’ or they would bring all their friends over to watch a vacation slideshow. Remember those?
Nowadays the whole process is seemingly controlled by Facebook: add the photos to a digital album, and your friends can be jealous of you…even while you’re still on vacation!
I, for one, had recently purchased the tastiest latte at Starbucks. They had a 2 for 1 drink special, and coupled with a coupon that Starbucks had at the time, I was able to buy the latte for super-cheap. When I tasted it I was so excited that I took a picture of the invoice on the outside of the latte and (fatefully) uploaded it to Facebook.
After a few likes and ‘so jealous!’ replies, the picture disappeared. Apparently the photo had some important information about either Fedex or Starbucks (I could never get a straight answer) and Facebook deleted it. Not only that, but they deleted all of my albums for the last year.
It was gone! All gone!
For one, I considered Facebook my new repository for photos and deleted them off my camera and computer to save space. It’s dumb to do that, I know, but I know a lot of people do the exact same thing. When your hard drive is getting full, pictures are the easiest thing to get rid of.
But that’s not all that’s dumb: once I started downloading my pictures back off of Facebook, I discovered that they were heavily compressed.
My vacation photos came back terribly pixelated.
But I found another avenue for my photos: Google+. When I took some new photos and uploaded them, I found that the photos were twice as large as Facebook. Google+ still does compression, but the pictures on Google+ are perfectly respectable looking if you look at them on a high resolution monitor. If you want to make a photo into a large poster, then you will still need the raw file.
I still have backups, and I’ve invested in dropbox for photo storage. But Google+ is my go-to place for uploading my vacation photos now. You can upload them to Facebook afterwards (if you miss the ‘likes’ and comments), but you still have a good sized record of your photos for whenever you might need them.