The future of media storage

Something happened to me this week.  I have been hiding from it, though I saw coming for a long time.  Like a person denying something as inevitable as death, I denied that I would ever run out of hard drive space; but it happened.  Now what do I do?  Just buy an external hard drive you say?  I'm sorry, but it isn't that simple...

What's eating up all my hard drive space is my digital photography (and rad-tastic 80s mix).  I'm a big fan of having everything stored on my laptop -- using an external hard drive only for backup.  I love having access to every single photo I've ever taken (19,500+) from the single interface of the iPhoto desktop application.  Until last week, if you asked to see a photo from my sophomore year of college, I would grab my laptop and produce the snapshot within seconds.  Now, every photo that I take will need to be stored someplace else -- maybe on an external hard drive, an online photo storage site, or, if I'm really stubborn, a new laptop.  And until I make a decision, I'm shying away from taking more pictures.

So what's causing my predicament?  Well, the increasing reliability of computers certainly has an effect.  When my parents bought a desktop in 1999 with a 20GB hard drive, I convinced them that by the time they filled their behemoth they would be long overdue for a replacement, which was the exact case.  But now, other than the fact that it's bursting at the seams, my 100GB laptop works as well as it did the day I bought it two years ago.  If I buy a new computer just for the convenience of being able to access all of my photos from the desktop application, I'd be spending money when I really didn't have to.

Therefore, if I want to be able to access any picture at any time without running to find some external drive, some sort of permanent online storage is my solution; and it makes sense.  After all, many tasks that were once performed locally are now managed online.  Remote storage is becoming more affordable and web-based services are becoming more sophisticated.  The local storage of media is becoming a thing of the past. Big-name manufacturer Apple is putting its money where its mouth is with the relatively low-capacity MacBook Air and the streaming media capable iPhone. 

Managing photos and other media online has benefits that simply cannot be achieved with simple desktop storage, like easy sharing and the ability to tag friends from social networks.  But the convenience of local storage is hard to beat.  As internet connections become more ubiquitous, photos stored online are easy to access.  But until fast connections -- I mean really fast connections-- become ubiquitous, it will be hard to justify online storage of actual size photos.

My solution is this: store all actual-size original photos on an external hard drive and upload reasonable quality photos to an online album.  For $20 or $75/year, you can snag 10 or 40GB, respectfully, on Google's Picasa, which should be plenty of space for anyone's personal collection (and is much less expensive than buying a new computer).  Or Flickr, if you prefer, gives you 2GB of space.  With given speed of most broadband connections and the increasing resolution of digital cameras it is currently impractical to store actual size photos online unless you have a tiny library or lots of free time.  My stance might change when FIOS comes to Wilmington, NC, but until then, I can't justify the time and effort of uploading gigabytes upon gigabytes of photos at 50-100k/second.

Picasa, here I come.