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General discussion

How do you store your digital photos?

May 19, 2015 10:18AM PDT

Poll: How do you store your digital photos?
A. Photobucket
B. Flickr
C. Dropbox
D. Social media
E. I don't, I print all of my pictures
F. Other

Be sure to read this useful article that compares many photo-sharing and storage sites and comment below!

Discussion is locked

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And then there were none...
May 19, 2015 11:27AM PDT

A day is coming when we have no antiques that were made in our own country and no paper based photographs to prove we existed beyond 2020...

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I still print some
May 19, 2015 11:44AM PDT

Most of the pictures I take now, with my digital camera, HQ digital cam corder, tablet or phone, get stored on my hard drive in various folders. I do not like these programs that try to organize things for you - I prefer to do it myself.

And yes I do still print out photos, from time to time. The ones I think are important enough to save for what ever reason, get printed out.

But long gone are the days of the shutterbug and the prints that come with the negatives, so that you can see if the picture you thought you took, really was.

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Why isn't there a choice for "local hard drive(s)?"
May 19, 2015 11:45AM PDT

I have well over 100K of my own images, which are stored on a hard drive and redundantly backed up 3X (1 drive is stored offsite).

I can't believe this type of arrangement isn't even listed as a choice.

A tiny subset is on Flickr, but I don;t consider that "storage."

Not everyone has drunk that Kloud Kool-Aid, you know.

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Agreed
May 20, 2015 1:48AM PDT

I completely share your incredulity and was a bout to comment on it myself. I have little use for social media and none at all when it comes to storing my personal stuff.

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Ditto for me
May 20, 2015 5:08AM PDT

I, too, was wondering about the local storage option. When I voted today, "Other" had garnered 75% of the votes. Somebody didn't think through this question and its responses too deeply.

I'm lucky to be able to keep all multimedia files (pictures, videos, music, etc.) on one 4-year-old computer, and everything else on a different, relatively new computer. That way I can concentrate all of the software for things like photo and video editing, as well as links to various online sources, on one machine. It also has a 5.1 sound system, so all of my music is played there. Whenever I've accumulated a few GB of photos, I also burn a DVD for backup. With all of the free cloud storage available these days, I also keep copies of the last few years there, but I only consider that as a fail-safe.

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On my hard drive
May 19, 2015 12:04PM PDT

Interesting that 66% (as of this writing) store their pictures in Other which includes, in my case, on my own pc hard drive. I justt don't see the need to use an outside storage.

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on my hard drive
May 19, 2015 3:31PM PDT

I store them on my hard drive on several computers and also use thumb drives. I usually edit them on Picasa, where I can email them and they are synced to my other Computers. Some I copy to a CD or DVD and send them to people far away.

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Outside Storage...
May 19, 2015 6:21PM PDT

"I justt don't see the need to use an outside storage."

Well whether you know it or not, hard drives (including and especially SSD's) has a predetermined write access limit that when reached, will prevent the drive from writing any new data to it. In most situations (fairly common), the data on the drive can still be retrieved, but a new/other HD will be needed to move and keep the data. So, since no hard drive lasts forever there are a number of companies that now offer Cloud Storage which is basically online storage space that is backed up for you and guaranteed to not be damaged or lost, FOREVER. Google has Google Drive, Microsoft has Skydrive/One Drive, Dropbox, which is it's own company (I think may offer 50GB of Free Storage).
These services, when setup and installed will automatically backup predefined files and folders on your computer, phone, tablet or other device and safely and securely allow you to access those same files from anywhere in the world with the proper permissions and/or 'Link'/'URL'/'Website Address'.

@reli37, hopefully this little explanation will show you a possible 'NEED' to use an outside "Cloud Storage" account so as not to ever lose or misplace your personal files. Music, Movies, Photo's, Software... All can be saved and accessed anywhere you have access to the internet, as long as you remember how to access your specific account.
Google is HIGHLY recommended by myself and more than a million others. Uploaded pictures and files to Facebook will also never be deleted unless you do so, yourself.

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Never, You Hope
May 30, 2015 8:21AM PDT

In the cloudy world of today, sites can be as evanescent as clouds in the sky. Never say never!

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They have a function.
May 21, 2015 9:08AM PDT

Sharing loads of images taken when Little Sister and her dogs come down for a frolic at the seaside is a good use for sites like 4Shared and PixMania. Sending huge chunks of data by email is not realistic.

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They have what function?
May 21, 2015 1:27PM PDT

Hartiq, the question was more about storage rather than sharing. True, sharing is quicker via on-line sites because the lengthy session of uploading images has to be done only once. The size of your original images also makes a big difference; most people don't need to send the humongous-sized files that most low-priced cameras are capable of, but they often send those 2+ MB pictures anyway because they don't want to take the time to downsize the images.

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Sharing *is* storing for some values of "sister".
May 22, 2015 12:06AM PDT
"Hartiq, the question was more about storage rather than sharing."

You've obviously never dealt with my sister. Sharing *is* storing. If I want her to ever have even a remote chance of seeing an image I need to be able to store it four times longer than the time to the heatdeath of the cosmos.
But that sort of pseudo-temporary storage is about the only reason I use storage sites so I just thought it was worth mentioning.
Don't worry, I won't interrupt again.
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This Life
May 19, 2015 12:04PM PDT

I use This Life. I like how photos are organized but they need to improve how they can be shared. The auto uploader is great and it continues to do the same as pictures are taken (without prompting it).

I don't like the "stories". They need to drop that idea and be more obvious with directions. Don't call something a story- let a command be what it is.

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digital photo storage
May 19, 2015 12:10PM PDT

Start with the basic premise that n o cyber storage method is (a) secure, or (b) reliable in the long run.

I have (paper prints of) family photos going back to 1907 (grandfather) and 1927 (dad). Plus the original negatives of most of my 2nd-half-20th-Century photos. What happens to the photos we take on our telephones when we turn in the phone for a new one when it goes bad after a couple of years? They disappear. What happens when the online photo storage companies go out of business? Our photos disappear.

My system -- honed from my years as a professional wedding photographer -- is really simple and secure. Photos taken during the course of a calendar year are kept on a discrete hard drive on my desktop computer for that year. Every assignment is also duplicated onto its own photo DVD, which is securely filed in a fire-resistant environment. These discs are kept for at least 10 years (and family stuff is kept indefinitely).

This way, my grandchildren will be able to access their family photo history..... at least so long as .jpg remains a standard photo extension *chuckle* That also assumes the DVDs will last as long as silver on paper and that the technology to read these early 21st-Century files will remain available.

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My hard drive
May 19, 2015 12:19PM PDT

I like to organize my photos the way I want them, so I keep them on my hard drives and print them if necessary. I keep them synced on 3 different computers in case of a computer failure and occasionally back them up to Blue-Ray disk ( yes I have that many).

My photos are very important to me and I do not trust others to keep them for me.

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Local and Shutterfly
May 19, 2015 12:24PM PDT

Raw dumps from phones and cameras go into a date-and-camera folder structure on my local hard drive, and that gets backed up twice with CrashPlan (one local, one cloud). Interesting shots get uploaded to Shutterfly albums.

For the few single prints that we still make, we have been very impressed by Shutterfly's quality and responsiveness. We have also tried and been impressed with their photo books. And I recently scanned and cleaned up a 40-year-old 4x6 photo and had a 16x20 print made for a memorial service; we had it in a few days and everyone was impressed.

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Yes to it all - paper, digital etc
May 19, 2015 12:29PM PDT

You simply never know what kind of disaster may happen that would destroy your paper photos, your digital media, or the servers for your cloud storage. For me - photos are really important. Both my husband and I are photogs and come from picture taking families. We are talking thousands here. So - we pretty much have one from each column of storage. We print out some, we make albums, I create books for the families and the photos are reduntantly stored for each of us on: 1 our main computer hard drives,
2 laptop drives and cameras for the most current
3 Dropbox (fr computer)
4 Google+ (auto fr phone),
5 Skydrive (auto fr tablet) & Geneology sites
and I also use Flikr and my husband uses Smugmug
also each of us has every photo we have ever taken on several rotated external hard drives.
I also have special situations on DVD's.
And these physical hard drives and DVD's are stored in 3 different physical locations.
Paper photos and slides are stored separately after being professionally scanned.
And everything is completely backed up redundantly once every 2 months.

And just recently I decided to use ThisLife to also containg all photos from everywhere. It makes it easy to
make those books. We use Shutterfly, Snapfish and Blurb mostly.

And yes - we both spend a lot of time with our photos. Now don't get me started on music!

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OneDrive
May 19, 2015 12:50PM PDT

I use OneDrive - they raised their space to 10TB for paid subscribers. It also works well across platforms, does a great job backing up my images, makes it easy to share pictures, and has options for enhancing security (although I know security and "cloud" are terms that don't always go well together).

Coming to think of it; I do miss the days when pictures were printed at local camera shops or pharmacy chains. Nowadays I can go weeks just snapping pictures without even looking through them or organizing them.

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The ONLY Sensible Way...
May 19, 2015 1:27PM PDT

I have adequate storage on my PC to store ALL of my photos on it, and to back up all of those precious photos to an external drive.

Storage is cheap, and I fail to understand why anyone would want to put their most precious memories onto some "cloud" service where the data becomes the property of whoever owns the service.

Furthermore, I have already scanned all of my film-based photos into high-res digital images, which I regard as far more secure, as they exist on multiple hard drives, than the originals could possibly be.

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Hard drives
May 19, 2015 3:43PM PDT

If you are using a desktop pc, storage is not a problem. Just pop in a few more TBs, and you are set for thousands of photos. Huge hard drives are really low cost now. I shoot mostly full-frame digital pictures, and Lightroom creates dated folders, and also automatically backs up each photo I pull from the memory card to another drive.

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Hard disk and DVD
May 19, 2015 4:33PM PDT

As a semi-pro we don't store ANY online. I may upload some things to test print at Costco, but that is the only way you can print from them.

I have never deleted ANY files from my Android razr, but the images the sales took of us when showing us the features are GONE, now that I wanted to use them (they were half decent). So trust a phones memory to keep them safe.

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How I store my photos
May 19, 2015 4:57PM PDT

I store all of them on my NAS, in my own system of folders per subject/person.
They also automatically are backupped in Google+.
From important subjects (like a vacation trip, or a collection of photos of a good friend)
I make an album via an online service and have it printed.
With that same service I have calenders made in december and send them around.

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Digital beats physical
May 19, 2015 5:04PM PDT

If I keep a few thousand photos in boxes in the closet very few people are ever likely to see them. As we all know they can be destroyed in a fire. Digital is a better way to go.

I use SmugMug for my on-line photos. SmugMug is only $40/year and I can upload as many photos as I want to, full size, and friends and relatives can download them for free. Passwords allow me to control access. With photos on-line all of my friends and relatives around the world have access to them vs being stored in the closet.

I tag all of my photos so they can be searched. Not so for paper photos. Once on the computer they can be cropped, and edited.

Of course I backup and keep a copy offsite to thwart the potential fire. Disk space is cheap. I have 305GB of photos but I know there are lots of videos in that folder tree as well. Even at 300GB disks are way cheap. Western Digital My Passport 500GB drives are around $50 and prices are dropping all the time.

I have scanned thousands of photos into the computer. It's difficult to bring myself to toss all of those printed photos but one day I'm going to do it.

I have many family photos over 100 years old and the black and white versions are in very good condition. I do worry about what my descendants will have access to in 100+ years. Will the hard drives retain the data? Will on-line sites go away taking all of my work with them? Can I get some young relative to pay annual fees to keep my family photos available? Will .jpg photo files still be in use?

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Digital Photo Storage?
May 19, 2015 5:25PM PDT

I chose (F.) Other, because; while I do use Social Media to upload and store alot of the pictures that I take, I primarily use Google Drive (whom offers 15GB of free cloud storage when you sign up your gmail account as a Google + account; Google + is a very popular Social Media site powered by Google and integrated into Gmail, Google Search and the Google Chrome Web Browser.) since it enables me to upload, view and organize all of my photo's and video's using my Android phone (and/or tablet) through a program called 'Picasa' for Android. There are a number of other android applications that allow/enable access and management of media through Google Drive. Picasa, however is the most popular and my personal favorite because of ease-of-use and availability.
So, if you are like me and like to keep up with and store all of your pictures in/on one place or device, or share among multiple devices then 'Picasa' is the app for you! You can find it on the Google Play Store by searching "Tool for Picasa, Google+ Photo" by COLIFER LAB.

Enjoy!

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Redundancy Backup
May 19, 2015 6:25PM PDT

I keep a photo folder with sub folders\year\family group\event

As we get older memories become more important. Of course as we get older we acquire tons of photos. I try to discipline myself to upload pictures to my several "Picture Download" folders. IE: 001 Picture Download, 002 Picture Download, ...etc. I then copy those picture to a sub folder I call "compressed". IE: 002 Picture Download\Compressed. I use Corel's Paint Shop Pro to then clean up the pictures in the "Compressed" folder. After cropping and cleaning up the pictures I then run a resize script on all of those pictures in the folder. My personal choice for the script is making the pictures 8x10x300resolution. Now all of those pictures have become manageable for sharing and storing. They usually go from 1.5Mb to around 350Kb. These pictures will stay clear at this resolution and If you are keeping them as snap shots this will be just fine. If you want to print an 8x10 you know how clear they will be since that is the size of all of the pictures. If you want to crop these resized pictures now you may be disappointed you didn't do that prior to resizing. Now I rename all of the files in that "Compressed" folder. I copy and paste them into their dated location. IE: Pictures\2015\MyFamily\filename. (I make the file names stay in order of the year by renaming that group taken by using...2015 05 25 MyFamily at the Lake (1) That way my year of events is chronological.

Once those pictures are there in my master storage folder they get backed up to Carbonite. I also burn all of those pictures to disks. About every 5 years I burn a fresh set of disks.

It sounds like a lot of work and it was initially. Once I decided to organize the huge mess of pictures I had I was much happier. I'm about halfway through a trunk full of old photos I have been scanning. Since my computer is out where everyone can see it I once a month copy an old picture folder year and put it on my screen saver.

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Storing Digital Photos
May 19, 2015 9:32PM PDT

I store my digital photos on a dedicated harddrive that sits in a Cavalry port that permits me to swap harddrives as needed. I then create photo streams of just those photos that I want instant access to, using the Apple cloud so that I can access them on whatever device I am using at the time.

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other
May 19, 2015 9:33PM PDT

I follow the back up, back up, back up method. I keep originals on my pc. I have them backed up on an external hard drive and on Carbonite. And once a year I send a dvd with copies of all my photos and family history data to several family members for off site storage. I rarely print hard copies; I use digital photo frames to show my photos at home. My sister, once she receives her annual photo dvd, reviews the photos and puts them on Facebook.

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Printing a few here and there.
May 19, 2015 10:46PM PDT

And I do mean by a lab, and not an ink jet. The latter is a waste of money and materials, and the quality and lifespan cannot compare to photographic prints. Sure, most are stored locally, and on Dropbox. We only print the ones we want to display.

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No storage is absolutely safe.
May 20, 2015 12:27AM PDT

I work in a photo lab so you might think this is an interested opinion, but honestly, sooner or later any storage will fail. Even today you can print pictures taken more than a century ago, will a digital storage last over a century?

Just my piece of advice is the same I tell my customers: Take as many digital pictures as you want, but print the most important ones. So far, nothing could replace the printed picture.

Note: I don't live in the USA.

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Cloud too slow
May 19, 2015 11:34PM PDT

I store all of my family videos and photos on an external hard drive, backed up to another external hard drive. I also have them on a Plex server which is in raid. Call me paranoid, but these things are irreplaceable, and I have appointed myself the keeper of the flame. The files go from our grandparents to our grand-kids. Like I said the irreplaceable now in one easy accessible central repository.