I recently decided that backing up my photos online was probably in my best interest. Since I use a Mac and iPhoto, I decided to give MobileMe a shot. It seemed like the obvious first choice since it allowed me to do what I wanted right from iPhoto.

Honestly, I was unimpressed. Maybe it is because a lot of the cooler stuff in MobileMe requires an iPhone (which Verizon will apparently never get! Ok, ok, no Verizon/iPhone tangents). But not only was I unimpressed, I was quite shocked that my only option with Apple for publishing my photos online was MobileMe, which comes with a ton of other features... which all together cost $100 a year for the MINIMUM package!

There is no scaled down version or other service for just iPhoto and publishing your photos. Sure, you could use flickr or something else but I'm not looking to share, just store for safe keeping.

I'm starting to notice an "All or nothing" overpriced Apple trend. Sure, you can have iDisk storage or online photo album publishing but it comes with all this other stuff (most of which is for the iPhone) so you have to pay for it all. "What? Don't have an iphone? Oh well, all or nothing!"

Isn't that what happened to Australian buyers of the iPad? Stores were refusing to sell the iPad without a myriad of unneeded and unwanted accessories. The stores claimed it was Apple policy... "all or nothing!"

I've switched back to Picasa for obvious reasons. The 1gb free they give you is, of course, not enough space for all of my photos but $5 a year for 20gb is more than acceptable to me. Incidentally, 20gb is also what you get with the minimum MobileMe package... for $95 more!

The switch BACK to Picasa was even easier than the switch from Picasa to iPhoto. The Mac version of Picasa even used the iPhoto Library as an initial import source.