Storing Your Pictures to Last
Did you realize that from birth to adulthood, you could accumulate hundreds of thousands of pictures and videos? And what’s even more astonishing is that most of them are on your phone, left to chance that it won’t get lost, stolen or broken, and your precious pictures will be gone forever. It is true that technology is forever changing, but that doesn’t mean you can’t protect and archive your pictures to last a lifetime. Here are some tips for storing your pictures:
- Have more than one copy of each photo, stored in more than one way in more than one place.
- Keep moving pictures to new storage systems before the old one fails or becomes unreadable.
Choices of Storage:
- Disc drives (Hard drives & Memory cards) – Good rule of thumb is that a drive is increasingly likely to fail after five years or 50,000 hours of use.
- Optical discs – Panasonic Archival Grade or Century Archival Grade Blu-ray discs are claimed to last for 50+ or 100+ years respectively.
- Cloud storage – It is important to remember that data in the cloud is not safe and not under your control. Companies can also go out of business.
Best Photo Storage Products to Use
- SanDisk Extreme Pro 128GB SDXC UHS-I Card – $39.99 Amazon
- Verbatim M-Disc BDXL 100GB 4x Blu-ray Discs (Spindle, 25-Pack) – $346.73 B&H Photo
- Toshiba Canvio 1.0 TB USB
3.0 Portable Hard Drive – HDTC610XK3B1 – $46.99 Amazon - Kwilt – external device alternative to cloud storage – $89 to $149
Best Cloud Storage
- Amazon Photos – Unlimited storage, automatic photo uploading, photo printing service.
- Apple iCloud – Free but limited storage, automatic photo uploading.
- Canon Irista – 15GB of free storage, automatic photo uploading, photo printing service.
- Google Photos -Free unlimited storage, automatic photo uploading, photo printing service.
Once you have your pictures in safe and in multiple backup locations, you will want to make it a priority to print some pictures some pictures at least every six months or earlier, in the form of digital photo albums, wall displays, or for tabletop frames.
The art of “tidying up,” made famous by author Marie Kondu, includes a method for organizing and editing your family photographs:
- Be ready to let go of any that are similar, or are of scenes you don’t really remember.
- Choose the ones you want to keep, not the ones you want to discard.
- Make a folder on your computer and only put the ones you want in that folder. Delete the rest.
