It's an all-too familiar scenario: buckets of photos sitting on your memory card and a long, arduous task ahead as you try and find the best way to share precious shots with friends and family.

We've covered a couple of ways to organise your snaps, but when you want to take your burgeoning gallery online there are even more options available to you.

There's no doubt that doing it on the cheap (or even for free) is better for your back pocket, but in terms of flexibility and capacity, paid online storage is a good option. Here's a selection of services that offer storage (and also printing) services, complete with pricing and what you get for your money. Most of the options here are also available as free variants with lesser functionality and/or storage capacity.

Kodak Gallery
Kodak's Gallery service ... After a rather unceremonious email notification at the end of March, Kodak Gallery announced it was beginning to charge users for its online photo storage by asking them to make a minimum annual spend on prints. This is not a new phenomenon — Snapfish, for example, provides unlimited storage on the proviso that you make at least one purchase a year.

Kodak Gallery stipulates you have to spend at least US$4.99 per year if you have less than 2GB of photos stored, and US$19.99 per year for any amount over 2GB. Once you have uploaded your photos it's a simple act of deciding what format you want your prints in (photo book, standard prints, gift cards and so on) and proceeding to the checkout with your order.

Flickr
Most photographers will be already acquainted with one of the stalwarts of the photo sharing scene, Flickr, which has a subscription service called Flickr Pro. For US$24.95 per year, users have unlimited storage and unlimited upload capacity, unlike standard (free) users who are limited to 100MB upload capacity per month.

Ordering prints of your photos from Flickr is a little more complex than the Kodak all-in-one model: they offer a choice of several third-party companies that will print all sorts of content using your photos. The major advantage of Flickr is the community features, such as groups and forums. You can also choose to upload your photos to groups to move beyond just sharing with your contacts.

Picasa
Picasa Web Albums, the online variant of Google's Picasa, allows you to store and share photos just like the other sites listed here. It's limited to 1GB storage for a free account, and you can purchase additional storage in upgrades all the way up to 400GB for US$500 per year. The big advantage with Picasa Web Albums is that you can automatically sync your albums from your computer with the Picasa stand-alone software, and share folders accordingly.

Source: cnet.com.au

you didnt mention snapfish-free so long as you spend some money each year, e.g. 1 print at 20 cents.

Worth mentioning also is that you should take care to set relevant privacy settings on anything you post online. Picasa, Flickr, Facebook, all the major ones have privacy options.

In the case of Flickr, you can set your albums (some or all) as Private, which makes them only 'generally' accessible to your Flickr contacts, with the added ability to send anyone an link to a specific album (say, by email), and they will be able to use that special link to access that particular album without a password (you can also 'cancel' a link from working if it gets publicised, if need be).

In Facebook, you will usually want to set most family albums/photos to "Friends Only", while it's easy to set "Friends of Friends" for more general stuff like funny shared pics. Considering that many people on Facebook have upwards of even 1000 so-called 'friends' (!), it pays to be a bit discriminating with the FoF option. You can change your default setting for new posts/uploads in Facebook's Privacy Settings page, which can be accessed by clicking the arrow next to the Log Out link up at the top right. You can choose to make a new post, photo or album "Public", "Friends of Friends", or more restricted to only a few people you choose from your friends list, by clicking the little padlock or gear symbol on any new post.

Picasa Web Albums used to be pretty lax with their privacy options, only providing an 'Unlisted' option (not very secure), but they improved things sometime in the past few years and this page from them gives a simple explanation of their current options:
http://support.google.com/picasa/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=39551

Finally, you should always ensure you have an offline copy of all your precious memories, as companies do shut down or discontinue services, web servers can fail, get damaged or hacked, or people can make mistakes and lose files as a result. External USB hard drives get cheaper by the month (despite the November 2011 Thailand floods sending prices skyrocketing due to factory shutdowns/damage), Officeworks.com.au currently have a Seagate 320GB Pocket Hard Drive @ $55 on a promotion, or you can pick up a 16GB USB key for around $20-25 (32GB about $35) if you want something small enough for your keyring.

It's worth it, to keep your memories safe!

Kind regards,
- Matthew

Please note: I do provide data recovery services along with my regular business of computer repairs, and at much, MUCH better value than commercial data recovery companies (I've seen many cases of those essentially holding customers' data for ransom, and almost always 4-figure bills, ugh.) Please feel free to contact me (Matthew, Techie Matt) on 07) 5641 4666 if you're seeking advice regarding a related problem. I hope it's okay for me to include this