How do you store your photos?

[MarkBarbieri]

From time to time, I see social media posts begging for help because someone has lost their phone or camera with a whole bunch of precious pictures that they don't have backed up. I hope that nobody here stores their pictures only on a breakable/stealable/losable device that they carry around with them. So how do you store your photos?

For my dedicated cameras, I import my pictures from my memory cards using Lightroom, copying the files to my desktop PC. From there they are automatically backed up to my NAS and to my cloud backup service (Backblaze, who I love). The NAS backup isn't really necessary, but I like having them there. It's easier for me to access them from different computers and it is how my wife and I share photo libraries.

For my phone pictures, I have them automatically backed up to Google Photos. My NAS it set up to download all my Google Photos. From there, I import them into Lightroom and load them in with the rest of my pictures so that I have everything in one place. Of course, those are also backed up to Backblaze.

Why bother to back up the Google Photos pictures? Partly because I want everything in one place. Partly because I don't want to pay Google for too much storage. Partly because I don't want to be too tightly tied to a single vendor. Partly because I want protection against my Google Photos account being hacked and my pictures destroyed by vandals or ransomeware people.

I'm still working on the solution for how I'll set up my pictures to outlive me. That's a more complicated problem and I think it relies heavily on good metadata.

So what do you do? If you're not happy with your current solution, what don't you like about that others of us on the forum could help you with?

 

[_19disnA]

Should always copy your photos from the camera to your PC or some other type of storage device. Depends partly on how many you have and how important they are to not lose. I don't like storing things online as companies can suddenly go out of business, get hacked or have tech issues that causes a loss of pictures. I don't care to store photos in public places online where other random people might have access to them (no matter how 'secure' they claim it is), so it partly depends on how you feel about each method of storage.

There are also reasonably cheap external hard drive type devices where you can store a LOT of photos.

I agree with you that having the ONLY copy of important photos on a camera memory card is a really BAD idea.

I think it also depends on how long you plan to keep them and who else may want to see these. We have some printed photos we found in our grandparents belongings after they passed away and honestly none of us know anyone in those pictures besides our grandparents. If no one knows anyone is some old family pictures, there is less reason to keep them.

 

[jimim]

I keep it simple. import pics from whatever often or as needed to Lightroom. make copies of those imports to like 4 hard drives. I don't mess with any cloud stuff. don't want em out there don't want to depend on someone else loosing my stuff or messing up my stuff. if any of my 4 backups go bad it's on myself and no one else. 2 are in fireproof safe's. other 2 in the gun safe.

 

[MarkBarbieri]

I used to back up to external drives. To protect myself from fire/flood/theft, I kept one set of drives at my office and another set at home. I swapped them every 6 months, so in the worst case scenario of a massive fire, I'd only have 6 months of pictures at risk.

I don't share y'all's concerns about privacy. Online backup services are pretty secure. They aren't perfect, but neither is the security of your own network connected devices. And there is virtually no value in someone taking the time to hack into my online backups to access my photos. For the files I do consider sensitive, I store them in encrypted folders.

What I love most about using an online backup service is that it is effortless. When I come home from a photoshoot with a 128gb card filled with pictures, they'll all be backed up to the cloud within a few hours - long before I reformat the card and use it again.

 

[KVH]

I keep a local copy, another on a NAS, and every now and then, I'll shoot a version to a portable drive. I don't bother with the cloud largely because I don't want yet another cost (multiple streaming accounts have soured me on such a thing). Works OK for me and don't have problems there. My real problem is cataloging and indexing. Keywording is becoming a PITA. Think it may be time to go back and revisit hierarchy and structure yet again.

What's worse is a file cabinet full of negatives and storage of prints. It's the on thing my wife constantly worries about losing. She knows I've got the digital situation in an easily recoverable position. Stuff we shot on file stands a fair chance of being lost in a disaster.

 

[KVH]

And now that I think of it, to piggyback on this - what the heck does everyone do with their video files? I mean the big files, 500MB and more. In the past, I used to just burn a DVD, file it away, and say goodbye to the disk copy. Anyone else have a better solution? I feel like I'm becoming my father (early videocam adopter) who still has a few hundred VHS cassettes of home movies.

 

[MarkBarbieri]

And now that I think of it, to piggyback on this - what the heck does everyone do with their video files? I mean the big files, 500MB and more. In the past, I used to just burn a DVD, file it away, and say goodbye to the disk copy. Anyone else have a better solution? I feel like I'm becoming my father (early videocam adopter) who still has a few hundred VHS cassettes of home movies.

I mix mine in with my photos. I store my "creative" files in folders by year/month/day spread across a few disks. The current stuff goes on an NVME drive for performance. The older stuff is spread across two 12 TB hard drives. When I store the files, I don't segregate photos, video, or audio. I rely on other tools like Lightroom and Premiere to keep up with that.

I did a quick check and it looks like these are my file counts and sizes by type. As you can see, the video files are small in number, but they take up over 5TB or about 40% of my storage.



That leads to another point. For people with a significant number of video files or a very large number of images, cloud backups can be cheaper than external drives. I pay something like $70/year to back up my 13TB of creative files, plus my fairly extensive movie/TV show collection, and all my other stuff. If I relied on external drives, I'd need about $400 worth to store a single copy and $800 if I wanted to store two copies. I find that I have much more storage used than the typical hobbyist photographer, but less than the typical hobbyist videographer.

 

[tazdev3225]

I had mine on a computer that crashed. Fortunately I had backed up to an external hard drive. That crashed. I just spent a LOT of money to salvage what I could, believe me it was almost as much as a solo trip to Disney.. Cleaning out a drawer I found an external hard drive I didn't know I had. Thankfully most of my photos were on there.

My brother is a tech genius and told me to try and store my photos in a cloud and back up to more than one hard drive but to stay away from WD Passport and stick to Toshiba. I will at some point. Between all of this it seems like I will only lose my pictures from my Scotland trip in 2019. I have the memory card but it keeps telling me it needs to be reformatted. Now I am trying to figure out how to get all of the pictures back. Thankfully some of them wound up in a cloud and under saved pictures. I may not be able to get everything back but I am happy with what II have at the moment. I never reuse my memory cards. They are cheap enough that I save them. I even have my old Compact Flash cards from my first digital DSLR.

Any ideas how to get the pics from the memory card?