2013, Graf, Sebastian, Miller, Wolfgang, Waldvogel, Marcel

Cloud Storages combine high availability with the unences- sity to maintain any own infrastructure and all-time availability. A wide field of different providers offer a flexible portfolio for any technical need and financial possibility. Yet, the possibilities of different cloud storage providers have all one issue in common: Basic storage is cheap whereas the costs increase with the storage consumed adhering the pay-as-you- go paradigm. Photo sharing websites such as Facebook, Picasa-Web, and Flickr leverage from own cloud infrastructure and offer unlimited storage for less or no charge. Obviously pictures can be used to store information in, which has been used for steganography and watermarking at low data rates. We propose a general framework for storing large amounts of data, its data density and error-correcting mechanisms tunable to the properties of the photo sharing website of your choice. Our cost- performance-analysis shows that photo sharing websites compare favorably to professional cloud storage services such as Amazon S3. Thanks to the integration of our software as a backend to the widely-used jClouds framework, everyone can now use photo sharing websites as one component for low-cost purposes, including archival.