I wish I could charge some sort of arbitrary amount of money every time a company changes their policies to existing customers. Bastards would add a ripcord fee to a skydiver at 6000 feet and falling.

shutterfly is better than kodak & snapfish - it's the only one of those 3 that doesn't require login account info for friends you send the link to to see your photos - shutterfly also has nice albums to make....

Of course, there's Google Picassa, Flickr and WebShots that offer free online storage, and Flickr, WebShots, Smugmug and MobileMe for your more robust supported online photo needs.

They're all quite dandy in different ways, and better (I think) than Shutterfly and Kodak.

this is really disappointing to people who bought a kodak digital picture frame. actually i'm pretty ticked about it.

Also, when Kodak renamed the site from ofoto.com to kodakgallery.com, they switched from using actual photo paper and high quality printing to jet printer paper and mediocre printing. Way to go, Kodak! You lost me as a customer.

Doesn't everyone know we are in a recession? The cost of producing those bytes of online storage are skyrocketing! My grandpa still talks about the good ol' days where you could spend a nickel to fill up on bytes.....

@Trai_Dep: I liked Picasa and Flickr's free offerings, but always had issues uploading pictures.

SmugMug did it for me (even though it's paid) because of the ease of uploading, ease of sharing, and fabulous customer service. They promise actual human response times to email "within minutes 365 days-a-year nearly around-the-clock" [www.smugmug.com]

True enough, I tested it one Saturday night, around 10PM and had an intelligent reply in 14 minutes. First year is $25 for my plan.

I have about 300 pictures I need to print. Does anyone know a way I can upload them and print them in one quick action. I am okay if they are all the same size. Seems like most sites want you to find the file on your hard drive, select print size and cropping options, then next. I dont want to do that 300 times.

If I had to just use the pay services - a combo of shutterfly and snapfish is ideal. One for cheap prints, the other for the backups.

if you pay for a pro flickr account and it expires, you get to keep the extra albums you created when you had an active pro account, which is a huge plus to me.

Ritzpix does this as well. I had an account there b/c there was one very close by that also sold good camera gear as well so my frequent buyer card paid off.

For storage/display I had everything at shutterfly early on but then moved it to my own server running Gallery with the hookup to shutterfly but eventually flickr was so simple and clean I couldn't resist it.

I still use Ritz the few times when I want to be able to go over there immediately but I have no expectation of long term storage.

SmugMug did it for me, too. It's a paid service, but so, SO worth it. I love the control they give to users, and their prints are phenomenal. They launched a card service last year, too, and I've never received so many compliments about our holiday card.

My ISP charges $5 for an ENTIRE WEBSITE with unlimited storage and unlimited bandwidth.

[www.midphase.com]

Install Gallery and upload to your hearts content.

[gallery.menalto.com]

Gallery even offers direct links to online print operations such as...SHUTTERFLY. Letting someone else host your photos for a fee is silly.

also a kodak digital frame owner and not pleased, teh online access was part of the reason i bought the overpriced frame. I wrote an email and will never buy nor recommend kodak again, all i can do i guess.

Does anybody here use Adorama? You can store albums and print prices are reasonable. They also offer 5 different papers, from matte to metallic. Great service and free storage, as far as my experience has been.

This deletion policy is nothing new. I lost all my Ofoto when Kodak purchased Ofoto. When I called I was told they notified me. I have held the same email for 10+ years now and nothing could I find. I was told the photos could not be undeleted or recovered.

Again, SayNoToNamingRights. Kodak Theatre for the Oscars. They have to pay for the place, so I guess this is where they're going to get the money.

/Just my 2 cents (or whatever they're shafting you for prints).

I love the quality of their pictures, and I've been waiting for this to happen. I will also keep using it, because I feel more secure sending links or giving permission to view Kodak galleries then I do posting stuff on Facebook or Flickr.

I just received this email myself. The thing that bothers me most about this is that I only used the storage service because they offered it free when I purchased my Kodak digital camera. Otherwise, I pretty much print everything myself. Oh well, guess I better go purchase a little flash drive or something similar. I guess purchasing one of their camera's just isn't enough.

@Xerloq: I've heard really good things about Smugmug. My photo-hosting needs are amateur enough that the free ones suffice, but if I was going to go for a paid one, Smugmug would be among the top of the list.
Support, as you note, is a valuable thing at 10pm.

*sigh* I have some old photos (2002-2004) on there from the ofoto days. I don't really feel like paying $55 to get an "archival CD" of those pictures, but I hate the low res pictures they display that I can save manually. Seriously, just give me my pictures.

And I'm a Kodak stockholder... so don't I own those pictures twice?

A relatively cheaper way to get your pictures back, if you no longer have the originals, is to pay for a premium membership. With a premium membership, you can download full resolution files of all your images. Yes, I realize it is ridiculous to pay to download your own pictures, but if you pay $2.49/month, then you have a month to download all your pictures. $2.49 plus some tedious clicking and downloading beats paying to buy an archive cd.

I migrated over from Yahoo photos. I seem to remember that the pictures were a somewhat decent resolution or a few years ago. I made the unfortunate mistake of backing up some pictures to Kodak gallery instead of a cd and now I am pretty much screwed. I also sent them a complaint e-mail. They should at least offer me a discount. The prices for prints are really not that bad when they have coupons but I prefer shutterfly, they have better deals. lglessner, I just might try your suggestion.

@Ninja007: The sanest thing would be to put all of those pictures onto USB thumb drive or a CD Rom and contact some local print shops like a Minuteman press or something. Negotiate a price with them for printing those photos onto standard sized paper. They might let you save some money if you cut the pictures out of the 8 x 11 sheets yourself. Then again this might only be an option if you live in a large metropolitan area.

As for an online option, I'd love to read some suggestions because I haven't a clue.

I hate to tell you guys, but you're a little late to the party. Kodak's site has ALWAYS been like this. I remember reading a review of all the photo sites about 4 or 5 years ago. I believe PC World did it. One of the cons for Kodak's site was that you have to buy something in a year period in order to keep your pics on. Granted they didn't make you pay a minimum price before, but it's been obvious from the start that Kodak isn't a good solution for online photo storage.

@Ninja007:
I believe that Costco's online photo printing service should fit your needs. I have never tried an order anywhere close to 300 pictures but printing out a group of 20 pictures quickly is pretty quick and easy.

Well now I"m wondering if there is an easy way to transfer my photos from the Kodak site to another site, or am I out of luck? Fortunately all my pics are on CDs at my house or on the computer, but it would be nice to just dump them from one site to another. Is this possible?

Shutterfly will allow you to download your pictures back to your computer, if they are posted on a share site. If you have a share site set up, it's like a photo blog (it can be private), you can select any photo and download it to your machine, so can family and friends.

You don't have to pay, to get your photos from Kodak. You can buy the archive CD if you'd like. But, you can also run their free EasyShare software - connect it to your Gallery account - right click on any (or all) of your images and do a "Save As..." - and then save them to your hard drive. This will download all of your images for free . . ..

Photobucket always works for me.

Kodak has really gone downhill. When their film business was getting killed by digital, they could have produced some really great digital film products like easy to use cameras and photobooks, but their products are CRAP and overpriced. I think it's another testament to what's wrong with oldschool american businesses.

Anyway, WinkFlash.com is the best print for the money. The site design is crappy but the results are the same as anywhere else.

Yikes, thanks for the heads up! I usually save all my pics on disks even before I load them on Kodak, but I will now start organzing my pics somewhere else. Darn!

I also think that kodak prevents you from downloading them for free either. so hopefully you've got backup copies somewhere.

Another vote for Smugmug (www.smugmug.com). I have a pro account with them for $150 a year, which lets me sell photos from weddings and other events, but the standard plan is only $40 a year, and comes with unlimited storage, no ads, amazing customer service, and great quality prints. Your photos are also backed up to 3 different servers, so if your computer catches on fire or is 'repaired' for good, your photos are still safe. Downloading photos is free, and backups start at $12. I have 14 GB of photos (about 5000 photos), and a backup would only cost $92-a pretty cheap insurance policy for my photos.

Please give [www.MyOtherDrive.com] a look. We offer photo sharing and online backup. You can share your photos with others while at the same time securely backup your files and protect yourself from data loss. Our pricing is only $4.99 per month for 500GB, less than 1/3 the cost of most file / photo sharing sites.

Snapfish does threaten to delete you after a year of no activity. But they are cool with you buying one 4x6 to meet that need. You can even buy it on coupon credit :)

I left Ofto when they became Kodak because all the Mac-friendly features went away in the switch. Glad I did. Though since I have the lovely iPhoto, I only use Snapfish for backup and to send in real film on the rare occasions I have it. Tip: pay for the photo CD at the time you send in the film. Its the same $5 it is anywhere, and its much more expensive to get "high res" a la carte later on.

This is why I will only use picasa (or flickr, if you like it better). Anyone can download as many copies of the full-size originals as they want. Snapfly/shutterfish, in addition to requiring people to make accounts don't make the full-size ones available to d/l without a fee.

Got one of those emails telling me to spend money on the site or they will delete my photos. I have backups of them, so delete away.

@AbbieShark: I installed the Easyshare software and you are correct, I am able to save my pics. However the resolution of the pictures is not the same as it was when I uploaded them so I am screwed if I ever want to make prints. At least I have copies now. Some are wedding pics too that I never got around to printing. Thank goodness I back up all my pictures now to a portable hard drive.

@my_imaginary_friends_bore_me: just to add, I have until May-16-2009 before they are deleted

@petitcerise: Is it as bad resolution as if you save the low-res image you see on the Kodak website during slideshow? Or is it somewhere between that and full-res?

And if you get the overpriced CD (which I might since there are pics there from years ago that friends posted), is it full-res?

Great idea. Sounds like it is time to move to one of the HUNDREDS of free photo storage services like Picassa which is much easier for people to use anyway since there is not silly login or other irritating features. Oh wait, I did that years ago. Relying solely on the Kodak brand and out-dated business models to carry you into this new world of digital media is completely unsustainable. Keep protecting that dying print business...I've moved fully to Fuji pro-lustre film anyway as it is much better paper (although Kodak does still do good paper). And finally, I can't believe how poorly you capatialized on the Kodak brand with the digital camera market -- Canon, Panasonic, Sony, (+10 other vendors) smoked you in this market thanks to good ol' divisional big company politics. Hopefully someone is still buying your commercial machines, although I think Fuji Frontier has quite a bit of the market.

Or you could just buy a high-capacity flash drive.

Mine is 8 GB, and it was less than $19 shipped. And you can access your photos any time you want, without having to be online or pay for a service.

Why would anyone rely on a retail site to store their photos? If you really want photo storage instead of just a place to keep your photos while you're waiting to order prints, you should use an external hard drive that is backed up in a second location (online, DVD, etc.). No retail site has any obligation to back up your photos...if Shutterfly's servers have a horrific crash one day, goodbye memories!

In short: corporate America isn't going to cover your butt. You have to do it yourself, as always.

@brandyk: I believe there's a term for this....oh right, "bait and switch"

@Dyscord: No...it hasn't...I've been on Kodak Gallery for over a year and never paid a dime.

Note to all: Please limit your comments to things you *actually know*. Thanks!

@Andrew Davis: Great idea! Why pay $20 when you could take this man's advice and pay twice as much! Brilliant!

Or...blatant spam?

@Rhyss: Same here. The only reason I used their online gallery was because we were on vacation and it did everything from the Kodak software. We could take pictures, have it upload everything at the end of the day, and tell the parents to check there daily for new pictures.

I had actually forgotten about them until I received the e-mail; I immediately went and deleted the online galleries and will be using something different when we go on vacation this year.

My wife wanted one of the pictures blown up big to hang over the bed, but we haven't gotten around to it, yet. Guess it'll be someone other than Kodak to do that for us.

The Gallery recently changed the pricing on prints. If you spend 4.99 or more on prints (34 4X6" prints) the shipping is free!. Under 4.99 the shipping is a flat rate of $1.50.