Online photo sites such as Flickr are perfect for sharing your pics with your friends wherever they happen to be, but how do you make sure your photos are seen only by the people you want to see them?

The fact is that online photo services are not a perfect solution for everyone.

There are privacy issues, security issues, and cost issues (Flickr’s not free for example. If you need to upload any more than 100MB a month – which is just 10 photos from a 12 megapixel camera in RAW format – you’ll need to start paying $25 a year), not to mention the issue of what happens to all your pics if the whole site suddenly goes down or the company goes out of business.

So what can you do? How can you get the same photo sharing capabilities that Flickr gives you while retaining much more control over your photos?

The answer is to buy the Western Digital My Book Home Network Storage box and create your own Flickr at home using Western Digital’s brand new iPhone and Android apps.

Let’s see how it works.

How to use the WD My Book to share your photos in your home

The WD My Book range is a set of home network storage boxes with huge capacities. The WD My Book World Edition, for example, comes with 1TB of storage space, while the WD My Book Live comes with a whopping 2TB of storage space.

Once you’ve connected the My Book to your network, every machine on that network can access any of the files stored on it.

But don’t worry about copying the files over – the MyBook will automatically back up any file or folder – or even your whole hard drive – that you tell it to. Once backed up, all these files, photos and videos can be viewed by anyone connected to your network, letting you share your media wherever you are in the house (and don’t worry – you can restrict access if you need to!)

How to share your photos across the Web

Of course, sharing photos across your home is all very well, but Flickr lets you share them across the Web as well.

So does the My Book! Using the My Book’s secure remote access feature, you can access your files from anywhere that has an Internet connection, whether you’re at work or on the other side of the world!

How to share your photos on your mobile phone

It gets better, though! Using WD’s new WD Photo Viewer app for iPhone or Android smartphones, you can view all of your pics from your mobile phone. All photos are automatically resized for optimal viewing on your phone, and there’s a smart filtering feature that lets you find exactly the photos you want quickly and easily.

You can even share your pics to Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, Picasa or email with just a single click, giving you the best of both worlds!

Your own personal Flickr

Western Digital have knocked the ball out the park with the My Drive range. They’ve turned a simple network backup solution into your own personal Flickr, and created a device that not only gives you the peace of mind of securely backing up all your precious memories, it lets you share them with your friends wherever you are in the world.

It really is your own personal Flickr – but with much more control.

Check out the WD My Book and My Book Live now.

Most dedicated NAS devices are not cheap, though. However, the gloriously sounding Addonics company has just released its own device that lets you take any existing USB hard disk and turn it into a NAS device in its own right, letting you share your existing hard disks with your entire LAN (and even across the Internet).

Think of is as a DIY NAS Adaptor – or NASA, for short!

The Addonics NASA, then, comprises a 10/100Mbps Ethernet port that you plug into your Ethernet socket, and a USB port, into which you plug your external hard drive, or even a USB printer.

Any machine on your network (i.e. that’s connected to your switch) can then access your hard drive, turning it instantly into a NAS.

If your switch is connected to the Internet via a router, then machines can retrieve files from your hard drive from the Internet via FTP.

How can they do this? The NASA isn’t just a dumb USB-Ethernet converter, you know – this things has brains! Specifically, it has a built-in FTP server that external clients can communicate with, as well a BitTorrent client, which lets you suck up your media from the Internet and dump it onto your new NAS device, even without any PC being left on controlling things.

Better still, the Addonics Nasa even has a UPnP server, meaning your dumb hard drive can share its media with other UPnP-equipped devices such as an XBox 360 that are also connected to the network.

Perhaps best of all, though, is the price – just $55 for a tiny box that lets 64 people share your external hard drives, and gives you a dedicated NAS from an old external hard drive that you only used occasionally. Genius!

[Source: Addonics, via Engadget]

Now media files, if you’ve ever looked, aren’t exactly small, so Buffalo decided to give the new LinkStation Quad a hefty amount of storage space. Actually that’s an understatement – they gave it 4TB of storage space!

This gigantic amount of storage space is enough to store millions of high-res images or thousands of videos. You can think of it as a giant black hole of storage, into which you can dump all your media from pretty much any source you want.

With connectivity options that include USB 2.0 and Ethernet, plus DLNA support, the LinkStation Quad will connect to your PC, Mac, digital camera, iPhone, mobile phone, and virtually anything else you can think of. Better still, because it supports DLNA, you can transfer your content to any other device seamlessly – in fact, getting your pictures from a digital camera, for example, can be achieved with just a single click of a button.

DLNA support also gives the LinkStation Quad a few other neat features, including the ability to stream content to other DLNA-equipped devices, including TVs or even a PS3.

As if all that wasn’t enough, the LinkStation Quad comes with a built-in BitTorrent client,which can be configured from any Web browser. Once it’s been configured, you switch your PC off and leave the LinkStation Quad to its devices, hoovering up the vast amounts of torrent files you’ve no doubt selected, which will be ready and waiting for you once they’ve all downloaded.

Once you’ve stored all your content, the LinkStation Quad makes sure it’s all nice and safe. The Quad in the name comes from the fact it contains four hard disks, each with 1TB capacity, and your data can be replicated across the hard disks for backup purposes using a number of different RAID configurations.

Buffalo have certainly gone to town with the new LinkStation Quad. It’s more functional than attractive, but as you access it via your PC, Mac, or connecting device, there’s no need to see it anyway!

If you’ve reached the stage where you’ve realised you’ve got far too much media for your PC or Mac to handle, the Buffalo LinkStation Quad looks like the perfect solution. Shame it’s doesn’t support Wi-Fi, but you can’t have everything I guess.

The Buffalo LinkStation Quad is available in 1TB, 2TB and 4TB options, priced