For sometime now I've been searching for an online solution to backup my photos.  I checked out a lot of Photo sites to see what they could offer me for free.  I almost settled on purchasing a new web host and installing (or writing) a PHP gallery package.  And then I found MediaMax  – the most generous online storage provider there is.

MediaMax offers 25GB of online storage for free!  The only restriction is that you can only store files less than 25MB and you can only download 1GB a month – more than suitable for backing-up my digital photos.

MediaMax will allow you to organise your photos into albums and share them with anyone.  Although compared to other photo album sites, its user interface isn't very attractive.  But I'm not interested in maintaining tags for my photos both offline and online.

But MediaMax will allow you to store any files you like, regardless of its type.  As its name might suggest, it focuses mostly on media allowing you to store and share your videos and music.  It even encourages you to backup your MP3 collection and allows you to create playlists and stream them.  I wonder if this will draw the attention of the record industry.

You can upload and download multiple files at once using your web browser.  A browser based java application allows you to drag-n-drop multiple files from your file manager to upload them quickly and easily. 

You can also FTP your files, but only to the system folder 'Uploaded Files' which you can then move via your web browser.  You can't download your files via FTP unless they are still in the 'Uploaded Files' folder.

Or you can also install the 1^st party application MediaMaxXL which gives you yet another way to easily upload and download your files.  It even allows you to synchronise folders between your PC and MediaMax – although I haven't tried this feature myself as the program doesn't currently work with network drives (which is where my photos are stored).

And finally, if you have a real issue with using your web browser to manage files on your MediaMax account, you can download and install the third party application, Davcin's MediaMax Explorer .  It gives you an Explorer-like interface to managing you collection of files which can be a little slow, but it works really well and development is very active.

The only real downside is that there seems to be a number of bugs with the system.  But they have a very well hidden blog where they give almost daily updates on the system status and are fairly diligent to responding to issues you can leave as a comment.