I'm in search for an affordable place to store family photos(as private), and my own creative photography. Over the many years I've accumulated thousands of images, with different cameras. I was thinking Flickr, Amazon Prime, Apple(I'm mac user), Dropbox. I also have some photos on Pbase since 2004. How jAlbum compares to all these sites in terms of security and flexibility...etc ? Can it be trusted storing family photos for very long term ? Thanks!

Thank you for your reply! Yes, Pbase is one of the very few pioneering photos sites on the internet. Since 1996 if I'm not mistaken. years before Flickr and all the rest big guns. Unfortunately they are indeed stuck in time. The truth is there were many many sites like Pbase back in early 2000, and most of them were gone a long time ago. So in this respect, Pbase is a a survivalist a la supreme. I also have multiple external drives and flush drives...etc. Storing photos I meant Private family photos, so other people family related or friends can look up whenever they like. So, if I make an album, can I lock it, to make it Private ?

Thanks Markus and Jeff You were very helpful, appreciate.
Last question though - am I correct, price wise, JA is the most affordable and most secure photo site ?
I've stumbled on many instances when people have lost their photos on Flickr and Amazon, probably Apple too.

I'm still not sure if you are aware of, that JA is not a site to store photos.

Lets make a real world exsample.

One of my photos is this, this is the original from the camera (5 MB):
D:\Users\MDrück\Pictures\2026 01 30 Norge\2026 02 02 Östersund - Jokkmokk\IMG_1613.JPG

jAlbum will generate two files:

1, the slide picture, the big pciture (215 KB):
D:\Users\My Albums\Master\2026 01 30 Norge\2026 01 30 Norge\2026 02 02 Östersund - Jokkmokk\slides\IMG_1613.avif

2, the thumb picture, the small pciture (9 KB):
D:\Users\My Albums\Master\2026 01 30 Norge\2026 01 30 Norge\2026 02 02 Östersund - Jokkmokk\thumbs\IMG_1613.avif

Only the slide and the thumb will be uploaded (to Jalbum or your own site), not the original.

So, this is the reason why jAlbum is not place to store your photos, it's a place to store albums.

Regardless of how well people back up their files, there's always a case to be made for the necessity of some sort of off-site backup, in case of fire, flood, whatever.

And yes, it would take a long time to upload terabytes of material, but one generally doesn't do it all at once, so it's not some sort of marathon.

AFAIK, there's no prohibition against using a jalbum.net account for this purpose. In fact, I keep a "disaster" backup copy of all of my skin development files on there (past versions, demo albums, site screenshots, and so on).

At present, I'm using my webhost as a similar disaster recovery repository of everything else. Technically not allowed by the terms of my hosting, but the volume isn't huge, and access is rare (just a once-a-month upload of new and changed files). The inode count is what you need to keep an eye on - that's usually restricted even when the total storage volume isn't.

If the volume were higher, I think I'd look into the AWS S3 Glacier Deep Archive storage. Very cheap, as long as you don't mind having to wait a day or so in the event you need to recover the stuff. And by "cheap," I mean $0.00099 per GB per month. That works out to $1 per TB. There would be additional charges for each of the PUT/LIST/GET calls, but it's minimal.

Of course one can use jalbum.net or any other service as a backup for an outside backup. I use the vault of my bank. I refresh the copy every 3 month.

Yes, I have to pay for that vault, but it's much cheeper than anything else. And, I trust by bank more than all the others. That said, of course I trust jalbum.net too, this is an exception!

Other than that, I have many backups at home too.