A Practical Guide to a Modern Photo-Strategy for an Everyday Person (ie Not a Pro-Photographer)
Most people have cell phones nowadays. Most of these cell phones have pretty good digital cameras. People take hundreds of photos each month and thousands of photos each year.
People love taking photos!
I bet a big chunk of you keep your pictures on your iPhone/cellphone until the space is about to run out and you quickly realize you can't take any more pictures without either deleting some or uploading some to the cloud to clear storage.
What's the best way to manage the thousands of photos that you for some reason won't delete haha? Don't worry, I have the digital hoarding syndrome too....I feel inclined to keep all the photos I take for some reason. Maybe one day we'll print the ones we considered deleting on a canvas or nice big frame?!
This is no expert advice by any means, but I've had the same challenge you all face and this is the best way yet that I've learned to manage my pics.
Strategy #1 - Use Amazon Drive
Amazon Drive - I haven't found a cheaper solution out there for storing all your photos (or even all your digital files). I don't love the user experience, but the price point is hard to beat. It'll cost you $11.99 per year for unlimited photo storage and you'll get an extra 5GB of space to store video files or non-photo files. If you want fully unlimited photos and document storage, it'll cost about $60 bucks per year with Amazon Drive. Also, if you happen to be an Amazon Prime user, Unlimited Photos comes complimentary!
Look at Amazon Drive as a backup vault for your photos. I also use it for my video vault since I have the unlimited plan. I understand you could probably name two or three other solutions that provide a better user experience and accessibility, but the point of having Amazon Drive is so you have a backup vault of your photos in case other options fail you. At $12 bucks per year, that's the cost of getting a few hamburgers. Sounds good to me.
Strategy #2 - Use Google Photos As Well
Google Photos provides a really nice photo experience in my humble opinion. It's easy, fast, and I can generally find what I'm looking for with ease. They also have cool features like having the ability to create mini-movies, animations, etc. I use Amazon Drive as my vault and Google Photos as my digital viewing library. If you're gung-ho about having several backups to ALL your pictures, you can upload all your stuff to Google as well. Best part, it's completely FREE as long as your photos don't exceed 16-megapixels. Videos capped at 1080p with free stuff as well.
Strategy Recommendation: Upload all your stuff to both Amazon and Google. You now have two cloud-based photo storage solutions protecting your memories. If you want to pay a little extra money with Google, you can bypass the 16-megapixel quality limit. I pay an extra $2 per month for 100GB worth of storage (includes Google Drive file storage) because it gives me the option to selectively choose photos that I want to retain original quality with. As an example, most photos I take I'm just fine having at 16 megapixel or less quality, but for a different handful of photos (ones I have in mind to print at some point) I choose to keep the original quality. Whenever you want a photo in original resolution, just be sure to go to your settings and make sure the setting is right before you make an upload. Another helpful tip is that if you don't want to have to remember to "upload" pictures from your devices both Google and Amazon have "auto-upload" features that can be switched on/off in settings.
Easy Peasy Lemon Sqeezy :)
I also liked these comments from a forum I found - nice info. to keep in mind:
Hold on a minute...let me guess what you're thinking. I've only mentioned cloud-based photo solutions so far....right you are! People have concerns with the cloud today. You have to wonder about security, privacy, etc. in our crazy world. I'm not a doomsday online person but I do know hackers are the real deal, so it's also nice to have some physical means of storing your treasured memories. At this point, you can continue to backup ALL your photos or be selective about which you love the most.
Strategy #3 - External Hard Drives, DVD's, and USB's
You can buy external hard drives pretty cheap whenever you need. They are nice because it's a physical vault to your important stuff. The bad thing about physical storage devices is they can go bad, crash, or get stolen/lost. I had a 300GB drive crash once. It was really disappointing and I didn't want to let that mistake happen to me again. Nonetheless, I think having at least one big external hard drive on hand (like 1TB) is pretty useful. Go get one and backup your digital collection physically as well as in the cloud. If your external hard drive goes bad, you'll still have everything on Google and Amazon and if Amazon/Google go nuts and change a bunch of rules, you'll have your external hard drive.
For pictures you absolutely love, I would also recommend making a DVD out of them. I wouldn't store my entire digital photo collection on DVD's. It would be too much of a time-suck and ongoing problem for me. I do like being able to have a physical copy of things like my wedding pictures and other significant life events at original resolution because frankly these are the kinds of pictures I would print to display in my house.
Flash drives can hold a surprising amount of space as well. If you want a second physical copy of your most beloved pictures, buy a few sizable flash drives and store them on these devices as well. Doing this is valuable because you might lose one hard drive, have it stolen, or some other unforeseen event. If an event like this should happen, you'll have at least one backup of your favorites on your other flash drive in addition to your external hard drive and cloud solutions.
In review, you should now have two online portals to access all the pictures of your hearts content, one external hard drive, a set of DVD's with your favorite photos, and a couple flash drives backing up those same oh so precious pics!
You might also checkout things like Dropbox, iCloud, etc. but I just don't find that I use those things as much anymore if at all. Dropbox seems good, but the price difference with Amazon and Google is significant enough that I opted for the Amazon/Google combo. The idea of this post is to help you feel more peace of mind with your photos and have a process to manage everything on an ongoing basis.
At a minimum, you'll know...
- Your photos are backed up
- You have both online and offline backups
- You have a set of your most favorite collections physically and online (make some "Favorite" albums for your cloud files so you don't have to sift too much for your faves)
Last but not least, pick some great photos you have from your collection and print them for your house. Put them in frames. Give them as gifts. Everyone loves seeing physical pictures because we're overwhelmed with online activity. There are a variety of services that offer photo-printing to make this a reality. Checkout sites like Shutterfly, Chatbooks, Groupon (search "Photo books" or something similar). If you're not about doing those things online, head down to Walmart and get your prints done there. I've done a few prints at Walmart and it was pretty painless and I didn't have to wait for anything to ship.
Well, hope this has helped folks.
Cheerio,
Andy Nielsen
No comments:
Post a Comment