A recent e-mail from Eastman Kodak Co. didn't lead to a Kodak moment for Vanessa Daniele. It got her angry.

On May 16, the company's Kodak Gallery online photo service will delete her picture albums unless she spends at least $4.99 by then and every year thereafter on prints and other products.

That's the new rule for people whose photos take up less than 2 gigabytes of space on Kodak's servers -- enough for about 2,000 1- megabyte photos. People over that limit must spend at least $19.99 a year. And customers who signed up under the old rules won't be given a pass.

"I don't ever think it's a good idea to change terms of service on customers after they've signed up, and demand a new storage fee or threaten deletion of photos," said Daniele, 26, who lives in Chicago. "That action doesn't value the customer or attract new ones."

The company's decision to change its policies illustrates the risks people face as they increasingly rely on privately run services to handle digital memories and communications. These services often state in the fine print that they can change the rules at any time, and users have little recourse when they do.

Many online photo services offer free storage of images as a way to lure customers who might buy prints or items with pictures imprinted on them. Hewlett-Packard Co.'s Snapfish offers unlimited storage to users who make an annual purchase of any amount.

These sites typically store users' original, high-resolution files on their servers, and display lower-resolution versions that are fine for Web viewing but might not be clear enough for good prints. So users who fail to keep copies of their original picture files might have to pay extra for the service.

Daniele's situation is complicated because the albums she organized and stored at Kodak Gallery are made up of pictures taken by friends and family and uploaded to the site by them. She doesn't have copies stored elsewhere. Now those images would be deleted even if she makes purchases above the site's new minimum but her friends and family don't.

Other photo sites, including Google Inc.'s Picasa, Fotki Inc., Yahoo Inc.'s Flickr, News Corp.'s Photobucket and Adobe Systems Inc.'s Photoshop.com still offer free services that let people share photos with others, although there are storage limits. You can buy additional storage or upgrade to a paid account for unlimited uploads.

Even more generous options are available at Shutterfly Inc., which offers free, unlimited photo storage, and on social- networking sites such as Facebook, which doesn't have a limit.