Apples .Mac service is an excellently put together package of services that compliments the iLife suite of software and OS X perfectly, however, there are some people for whom the additional cost of .Mac cannot be easily justified. With Leopards new Time Machine providing instant and invisible backups of all your local documents the .Mac iDisk facility is perhaps less necessary than in the past, although an offsite copy of important documents is always worth investing time in if your information has any value at all.

As far as photo publishing is concerned the new Gallery feature of .Mac coupled with iPhoto 08 is a solid and seamless way of publishing your photos but it does have one possible downside, particularly to those with large photo libraries, capacity. A standard .Mac subscription buys you just 10Gb of storage. This sounds a lot but once you start uploading photos and videos this space will be used up fairly quickly. One free service that doesn’t get that much publicity which provides free photo storage and integrates nicely with iPhoto is Zooomr. Zooomr is more akin to Flickr than .Mac gallery in terms of facilities provided as photos uploaded to the service become part of a huge repository which others can search through to find images by name or tags. As with Flickr you can elect to change the visibility of uploaded images to prevent anonymous users from finding them by marking them as Friends or Family only. Unlike Flickr however the uploading process for iPhoto users is much slicker. Once you select to upload images and click on the Browse button you are presented with a Finder window that includes your iPhoto library and events which you can then browse through visually to locate the images you wish to upload. If you select an Event all the images in that event are immediately queued for upload. Zooomr has a number of other nice features including the ability to highlight friends and family in a photo by placing a movable marquee over them. Once positioned you can then enter their Zooomr account or name and email address and they will receive an email notifying them that they have been tagged in a photo along with a link to take them to it to view.

New to .Mac since the release of Leopard is the Back To My Mac service. This allows you to connect to any Mac from any other Mac across the Internet and remote control it as if you were sat right in front of it. This is undoubtedly a useful service for a growing number of people, however the Apple solution is hampered by the fact that it is Apple only. You cannot remote control your Mac from a Windows PC or a Windows PC from your Mac for that matter. It is also known to be fussy about router configurations and many users have had difficulty making it work reliably.

The alternative to Back To My Mac that many including myself have discovered is LogMeIn. LogMeIn is a web service that allows remote control of any PC from any other PC including Windows and Mac machines, all that is required is a small utility is installed on any machines you wish to control. Once this is installed you are able to login to your profile on LogMeIn.com and instantly connect to that machine from anywhere on the Internet. LogMeIn have a range of services including options aimed at corporate users for supporting remote users, but the Free option works fine and does everything most people would need of a service such as this. From my point of view I now routinely install this on friends and families machines so when the inevitable 10pm phone call comes asking for help on how to do X or how do I fix Y I have the service ready to go and can quickly take over and sort out the problem.

Sync is another .Mac service that is readily available freely in the form of Plaxo. In the early days Plaxo was limited to synchronising Address Books but with recent upgrades Mac users can now use the service to not only Sync their iCal appointments to other Macs but also to Google Calendar, Outlook, Yahoo and a host of other services.

As you can see there are a range of alternatives to the solutions offered by .Mac. This isn’t to say that .Mac is not a good service and many would argue that the tightness of the integration with OS X and iLife is so good that it warrants the expense of an annual subscription. If you cannot justify the costs though, please do take a look at these alternatives you may find just what you need.