Backup online - Photoshelter archive

Try as I might, I fail to come up with a backup strategy for my images which I can trust. The problem of tracking multiple backups to hard disks and my inability to then get hard disks out of my home always worries me. As does my daughter who has twice come close to burning down the house...

So I have succumbed to joining Photoshelter Archive, accessible from my Photoshelter Collection account (that's the edited online stock photo library) but otherwise quite independent of it. I have 10Gb of space at $9.99 per month and that will be enough to keep me going for a while.

As I write this all the images that I have so far prepared and submitted to the Photoshelter Collection are uploading in the background. These were chosen in the main as being my better more interesting stock photos (or at least the first ones that came to hand!) - fortunately I kept these images stored on my hard disk after preparation so now I can bulk upload to the Photoshelter Archive.

Curiously I'm uploading ALL the images again because I cannot transfer from Photoshelter Collection to Photoshelter Archive - but I can send images the other way. So in future I will upload to the Archive and then across to sell on the Collection. If they are not rejected by the editors, that is.....

Some of these stock photos being uploaded were rejected for the Collection. But I can now put them on sale through the Archive where the commission is only 10% - an alternative way of completing sales requests off photoconnect....

I'm fascinated by some of the other options on the Photoshelter Archive - including setting up a 'virtual agency' which allows for me and other photographers to share a separately branded sales platform - it could for example sit within photoconnect. Or anywhere - to compete with Photoshelter Collection using the same engine (more or less). But what a waste of time without a huge marketing budget, which Photoshelter Collection allegedly has.

The Photoshelter Archive is about more than storing and selling stock photos. It allows me to store:

• crucial client photos from assignments
• images from my portfolio and
• personal images that I do not want lost

It's also an alternative to email for securely transferring images to a client.

Images can be kept private, put on sale, shown in public portfolios or shared with individual clients.

Because I'm being reasonably fussy about what I store, and I am storing prepared high quality .jpgs only (not RAWs) the storage should go a long way - 2000 images maybe. This is good because the next level up in terms of membership is $29.99 per month - an interesting option if I wanted to showcase stock images on the Light Touch site - although why I should do this I'm not sure when I have photoconnect!