What You're Really Signing Up For with Digital Photo Storage

A couple of years ago, a woman came to me wanting to know more about all this photo privacy stuff I've been talking about.  She said she had just learned that the online photobook company she'd been using for a couple of years reserves rights to all the photos uploaded to their site!  This means they could use pictures of this woman's baby in their advertising if they want.  Or sell them.  She was very concerned about photo privacy and dropped that company like a hot potato when she found out Heritage Makers does not reserve rights to your photos--they are completely private and solely yours.

The company this woman was dropping is, I believe, the most popular online photobook company out there.  Because of that (and probably because I'm a 14-year user of Heritage Makers and am quite accustomed to how they do things), I will admit that in the back of my mind I kind of didn't believe this gal.

I thought:  A company using your photos without your permission?!  How can that possibly be?!?

Guess what.  It's true.  

One Example (or, We Don't Know What We Don't Know)
This scary article, {Those Cloud Photo Services... What's the Risk?} confirms it, along with several others linked there.  According to Darla at HeartWork Organizing, many public services take the rights to your photos when you upload them to their site.  This includes Google Photos, Facebook, iCloud, Flickr, and really any social media platform.  Once you upload your photos to their site, you are giving them your photos.  They own them.

As just one example, Darla quotes the Google terms of use--what you are signing up for when you click "I accept."

"When you upload, submit, store, send or receive content to or through our Services, you give Google (and those we work with) a worldwide license to use, host, store, reproduce, modify, communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display, and distribute such content."

 "This license continues even if you stop using our service."

"Google may also stop providing Services to you, or add or create new limits to our services at any time." 

Okay, then.  Are your eyes as wide as mine are right now?

Darla's article also includes four links to stories of people's photos being used without their knowledge, including one where a family in Pennsylvania finds out that their picture had been used on a political ad flyer.

Not an Isolated Incident

In talking with Caren Osborne, a {professional photo organizer at Memory Lane Photo Solutions}, I learned a few more things that I didn't know about Google and iCloud.  Many people sync their phones to one of these "photo storage" methods, so they think their photos are safe up there in the cloud.  However, what most people don't know is that once you delete a photo from your phone, it's deleted from Google or from iCloud, too.  That's what syncing with your phone does--it connects the two, so whatever happens on your phone happens in the cloud, too.  

In fact, you can read about iCloud (and how many people mistake it for a photo backup when it's actually a sync) right here.

And I can't even tell you how many people have told me that they can't ever find their photos when they use iPhoto.  But that's another story.

Let me give you a way to avoid this, a way to keep your photos private!  

Keeping Our Photos Private and Safe

2022 UPDATE:  Heritage Makers will soon be retired and photo storage will not be a part of the new website.  In 2021,  I learned about Forever which offers private, full-resolution photo (and video!) storage.  

Forever goes a step further to offer permanent photo storage, meaning Forever guarantees your photos for your lifetime plus 100 years.  They do this by offering ownership of your storage--you buy it and therefore own it.  You don't rent it or pay a maintenance fee.  This is a great overview:

Your photos are even triple-backed-up with Forever Storage. There are lots more perks with Forever Photo Storage (which includes the ability to store video and audio files as well) which you can find at this informational webinar I taught in February:

In this webinar we talked about the fine print in many more photo cloud storage companies, too.

And here's how you can organize your photos well (and tag them, too!) in your Forever account:

If you do a web search for the best ways to store your digital photos, you'll find suggestions to store them two ways digitally and one way in print.  

Have you ever thought of having your photos in a book or album as photo storage?  Well, it is!

Print continues to be a largely overlooked and much more useful and satisfying form of photo storage.  You're still storing (preserving, really) your photos when you print them in a book or scrap page, and it's better than digital storage because photos are usually easier to find and easier to enjoy.  A page provides a place to record memories that belong to those photos, too, which is what makes the photo worth anything at all!

Forever allows you to store photos digitally and "store" (preserve!) them in print.

Forever also offers media conversion (digitizing of VHS tapes, film, slides, etc.).

Here's where it gets better.  Not only are your digital photos stored privately at full resolution, but the projects you create and print are, too.  That means it's not just your photos that are safely stored--it's your precious memories, too.  

Memories are what make photos mean something.  

So if this isn't what you currently get with your digital photo storage, you may want to drop your current choice like a hot potato.  

{Get started right here}.

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