As someone who has created a service (www.gatherthefamily.com) to do this, I can tell you there are no great solutions.

As a number of people have pointed out there are several problems with cloud based solutions:

1. Will the solution continue to be available

2. Will the company properly take care of your data, and protect your privacy vs. the companies own self interests.

3. There is an ongoing recurring cost.

With home based solutions you also have a large number of issues:

1. A lot of work that requires technical knowledge (making backups, regular testing, etc...)

2. You have to keep copies in multiple locations and maintain your own disaster recovery.

3. Obsolescence of your hardware, backup solution is a real problem.

4. This takes real time that you would probably prefer to spend doing something else, which means it will probably get neglected at some point, and therefore still highly susceptible disaster issues from hardware failure or much worse.

A number of people have suggested that the old way is better (Have paper copies of the photographs). This is also a bad solution

1. When converting modern digital photos to print you will loose data that is available in the digital photo.

2. Printed photos will degrade over time (Whether in a book or printed individually)

3. These are highly susceptible to destruction via disaster

4. There is no way to search your data

As far as the ongoing cost of storing in a cloud based solution, by the time you figure the cost for any of the other options when done right, The cloud based solution is probably cheaper depending on how you value your time in each of the other options.

As a number of people have pointed out in the comments as well, the photographs are only valuable if you have useful Metadata of the photos. With modern photos that is much better than before as you get a timestamp and often a GPS location with the photo. Ideally you want at least the date, location, event(if applicable), people in photo, description/story. That will take a photo from being useless to others besides the person who took it, to becoming highly valuable. The more information the better. Collecting that metadata is much harder to accomplish with old analog photos that have been digitized as they often have none of that metadata handy.

Storing, searching and using the metadata is solvable with good software. I tried solving many of those issues with my software. the issue that is not easily solvable is the where/how to store the data. My software allows storing on our service or you can import from Google Photos or Dropbox, but as noted those all have issues. If anyone has ideas on how to solve those issues and actually come up with a solution that is good, I would love to hear it.

user:	subssn21
created:	August 4, 2015
karma:	1