Storing photos the modern way!

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jackpot

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Wanting to get all my photos in one place so i can sort them out into albums etc. Ive been trying to find a particular photo and realised i have photos all over the place.

My phone automatically uploads to dropbox. 50gb at present for a year then goes down.
I have some stored on hard drive on old laptop. The same i have uploaded to Picasa on laptop.
Some stored on a pen drive.

Dropbox etc you on have a certain storage limit unless you pay.

Picase on laptop gives me the option to sync to google + (Ideal for phone as i now have chromebook and use android phone but again limited in storage)

What are the best options with having so many devices out there in the big bad world. Ive never really considered photo storage properly and now there seems so many ways.

Devices used. Android phone, Chromebook, possibly android tablet in future.

I can only think of paying for more storage on dropbox but as the years go by this could be costly or sticking to a high storage pen drive.
 
Copy.com are giving 50gb free and an extra 5gb for everyone you can sign up using your link.
 
I wouldn't trust everything to a pen drive as they can become corrupted and then it's all lost. Cloud storage is probably the way to go if you can get the space cheaply enough but probably worth keeping some kind of backup elsewhere.
 
Many in my camera club used cloud storage until the one they were using folded and although they did manage to retrieve much it pointed out the problem.

I use Minus but not really to store more to allow others to see my pictures. The same goes for websites I again use Freeiz which has a fair bit of storage but I would not rely on either.

With Minus I can store the original RAW file but there are two problems with that. One the files are big and two if anyone does get to your pictures they have the full file and what I normally do is to reduce pictures posted on Web so if anyone wants my picture they need to ask to get a file able to be printed as a good size.

My camera has two 32Gb cards so when uploading clearly I have 64Gb so a 50 gig limit would not have enough room for a pair of cards. Using DVD or even Bluray again not much room so really only option is a large hard drive. Really two hard drives one being a mirror of the other is only safe way.

CD and DVD records I have made in past have failed and the same goes for SD cards and pen drives.

As to how to organise I am told Lightroom is the answer. However I use Bridge which is part of Photoshop and it works reasonably well saving by date all photos on the card.

Much depends on size of files. With RAW files they are always maximum size so each image is 14Mb and the last trip I took with camera club after deleting poor images was 400 images.

Once processed and converted to Jpeg most become smaller and I often use FastStone Photo Resizer to reduce the size then put on the net and once reduced the 50Mb is OK but not really an option with original.

I have three external hard drives and any pictures I consider as important will always be on at least two drives.

I leave the name same as camera named and then add to back of name a description as if I change the name on the first bit then all too easy to get more copies then you want. Also it allows you to find RAW file after viewing Jpeg to further enhance the picture. They will have same start to file name.
 
A single blu ray disc can give you 50gb capacity, I back up everything once a year.
Also have a 1tb drive on mac specifically for back up.
 
foxhole said:
A single blu ray disc can give you 50gb capacity, I back up everything once a year.
Also have a 1tb drive on mac specifically for back up.
Click to expand...

The problems with writeable discs is the dye can (and does) break down over time. This makes interesting reading for anyone thinking of using writable DVDs for backup.

http://www.digitalfaq.com/reviews/dvd-media.htm

To be fair I don't know anything about blu-ray discs although I assume they could suffer from the same problems.

Pen drives and cards can and do fail. I don't trust online storage, and also I've got a fairly slow connection where I live.

There is the saying that if data doesn't exist in at least three places then it can be said to not exist at all. For instance a failure of the machine could give loss of the data on the machine, and any backup device being used at the time.

Portable hard drives seem to be the safest option at the present time.

To organise photographs I keyword into the xmp data with Exiftool / Exiftool GUI, and then just use Win 7s library and search functions if I need to find a particular shot.
 
mattylad said:
Copy.com are giving 50gb free and an extra 5gb for everyone you can sign up using your link.
Click to expand...

Sorry thats actually 15gb.

I'm currently up to 45gb lol

If I upload my pics I'll be getting another account elsewhere so I have a backup.

(Edit - changed to 45gb)
 
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