Do you use a free Dropbox account for storing and backing up your files? If so, get this: the company is currently offering up to 4.5GB of extra free space for anyone willing to help it test out the software’s new auto photo import feature. Your first photo import will land you 500MB of extra space, and every 500MB of photos and videos uploaded afterward will score you an additional 500MB. The new feature helps you automatically backup your photos every time you connect your memory card, phone, or camera to your computer, and can be download here.

Experimental Forum Build – 1.3.12 (via Lifehacker)

Apple’s doing it. Adobe’s doing it. Now Dropbox wants in. An upcoming version of the company’s popular cloud storage client will include a new photo importer feature that will automatically backup your photos whenever you connect a memory card, smartphone, or camera to your computer. You can try it out now by downloading the experimental build from this forum thread. Be sure to read the instructions to make sure you have a system that supports the feature.

Experimental Forum Build – 1.3.4 (via Caschy via Ghacks)

A couple days ago it was discovered that iPhones, iPods, and iPads running iOS 5 have a secret panorama mode that’s hidden in the operating system. The feature can be enabled, but featured either a jailbroken device or knowledge in how to edit a particular iOS 5 preference file. Luckily for non-hackers, Redmond Pie has discovered an easy way to do this by taking advantage of iTune’s backup feature. This tutorial will teach you how to get the panorama feature unlocked in 5-10 minutes.

The basic idea of this trick is to backup your device’s data to your computer, edit a single line in the backup files, and then restore the backup to your device.

Step 1: Backup Your Device in iTunes

You’ll need to back up your iPhone, iPod, or iPad to your computer using iTunes.

Step 2: Download iBackupBot

iBackupBot is a program for Windows and Mac that allows you to view and edit your iTunes backup data. The trial version should work fine.

Step 3: Open Up iBackupBot and Select Your Backup

Open up iBackupBot, and select your latest backup in the left pane.

Step 4: Locate the File

Locate the file named “com.apple.mobileslideshow.plist”. Sort by path to make this easier.

Step 5: Double Click the File to Edit

Double clicking the file will open up an editing screen for the file.

Step 6: Add an Entry to the File

Find the entry that says

<key>DiskSpaceWasLow</key>
<false/>

and right below it, add this entry:

<key>EnableFirebreak</key>
<true/>

Click the disk icon to save the file, and exit out of iBackupBot

Step 7: Restore Your Backup

Restore the edited backup data to your device. In iTunes, right click your device, and choose “Restore From Backup”.

Step 8: Take Panoramic Photographs!

You’re done! Open up your camera app, press “Options”, and you should now see a button that says “Panorama”. Press that to enter Panorama mode:

Press the Camera button to begin capturing, and sweep your camera from left to right to fill in the panoramic photo:

Here’s the first panorama I shot (download the full res here). Obviously I need to work on my technique a little):

For whatever reason, Apple chose not to include this Panorama mode by default in the latest version of iOS 5. However, it appears to be a fully developed mode that is definitely fun to play around with.

(via Redmond Pie via Engadget)

Everpix is a new company that wants to make your entire photo collection — both online and offline — accessible from anywhere through the cloud. Introduced yesterday at the TechCrunch Disrupt 2011 conference, the service will come as a desktop client that monitors folders on your computer and photo sharing accounts on the Internet. Whenever you add new photographs, they’re automatically beamed to the cloud (i.e. Everpix servers), allowing images created using many different devices and stored in many different places to be available in one central location. Even photos emailed to your through Gmail can be picked up and back up by the service.

Once on Everpix servers, the photos are automatically grouped into collections called “Moments”. These are private by default, but can be made public and shared with just one click.

Here’s a video of the presentation the founders made at TechCrunch Disrupt:

No word on when the service will fully launch to the public, but this could be an attractive solution for people who want a “set it and forget” approach to backing up photos.

There’s a good chance the digital photos you’ve stored on hard drives and DVDs won’t outlive you, but what if there was a disc that could last forever? M-Disc, short for Millenial Disc, is a new type of disc that doesn’t suffer from natural decay and degradation like existing disc technologies, allowing you to store data safely for somewhere between “1000 years” and “forever”.

Existing disc technologies write data using an organic dye layer that begins to experience “data rot” immediately after it’s written, causing the disc to become unreadable after a certain amount of time. The M-Disc, on the other hand, actually carves your data into “rock-like materials” that are known to last for centuries, meaning there’s no data rot. Apparently NASA uses the discs to store data. Hopefully it becomes available and affordable soon…

Millenniata (via Engadget)

It seems like everyone has access to some kind of camera these days, but will the digital images captured survive long enough to become part of the historical record of our time for future generations? John Naughton at The Guardian writes,

[...] while digital technology has generally been very good for photography as a mass medium, it has also made the resulting imagery much more fragile and impermanent. Of the billions of photographs taken every year, the vast majority exist only as digital files on camera memory cards or on the hard drives of PCs and servers in the internet “cloud”. In theory – given the right back-up regimes and long-term organisational arrangements – this means that they could, theoretically, endure for a long time. In practice, given the vulnerability of storage technology (all hard disks fail, eventually), the pace at which computing kit becomes obsolete and storage formats change, and the fact that most people’s Facebook accounts die with them, the likelihood is that most of those billions of photographs will not long survive those who took them.

That’s a startling thought — while it’s true that digital photos can last for quite some time if you’re tech-savvy enough to preserve them well, how many people in the general population actually do so? For the ordinary photo-taker, making a print will likely last much longer than their haphazard — or non-existant — backups.

Stick your pics in a proper family album [The Guardian]

Image credit: Broken hard drive? – Day 148 of Project 365 by purplemattfish

One of the gripes some people have with Flickr is that it doesn’t offer an easy way to download your complete collection of photos if you ever want to move your images elsewhere (though, hopefully you’re not using it as your only backup). Furthermore, if your Pro account ever expires, you can’t even access more than 200 of your old images without resubscribing. Google’s Picasa users won’t ever have this problem with the launch of a new service called Google Takeout, which allows you to download all your photos (and any other data you have stored with Google) as a single ZIP file.

Google Takeout gives you the peace of mind of knowing that you can always pack up and leave if you want to… though Google will do their best to make sure you never will.

Google Takeout (via Mashable)

If you’re like me, you have a bazillion photographs backed up on external hard drives, but have you ever wondered how digital photographs are stored on the magnetic surface of a platter spinning at thousands of rotations per minute? This interesting video provides a neat look at how hard drives work, though it will probably also convince you to back up your photographs by some other means as well (e.g. online or on discs). The engineering that makes hard drives possible is amazing!

Want to have the geekiest photo-storage device amongst all your photo-loving friends? Check out this 1:18 scale replica of the DeLorean Time Machine from Back to the Future. In addition to be a super faithful clone of the “real thing”, it also doubles as a 500GB Seagate external hard drive, allowing you to grab images from the past if you ever accidentally delete them. Well… maybe not, but for $250 you get a lot more than the average, boring old hard drive.

FRs Delorean Hard Drive (via Engadget)

TDK has unveiled a monstrous 1 terabyte (1000 gigabyte) optical disc at CEATEC 2010 (the Japanese equivalent of CES), which wrapped up a couple days ago. The disc has 16 layers on both sides that each store 32GB of data, and is the equivalent to about 213 of the recordable DVD discs that you might be using to back up your image files. As someone who uses multiple external hard drives and countless DVD-Rs to backup my photos, I’d love to use these massive discs for backups and redundancy.

However, unlike improvements in hard drives, optical discs technologies can take forever to find their way to consumers — just look at how long it took Blu-ray to become the de-facto successor to the DVD. We can dream though, can’t we?

(via Engadget)