How Storing Digital Photos Safely and Securely
“I always download my photos to my computer, and now my hard drive is getting full! What should I do?” It is a common question among many new photographers, and recently one of my students suggested I write an article about “Storing Digital Photos” to shed some light on how and where you should store your digital photos.
We’ve recently seen almost all digital cameras, including smartphones, with more resolution or Mega Pixels. Whether or not we need more megapixels is another topic, and plenty of arguments are going around on this subject. In this article, I will give you some tips about storing digital photos safely and securely.
Digital Cameras and Larger File size
With the higher resolutions of new digital cameras, you can fill up the entire hard drive of your computer in no time. You’re probably aware that if the hard drive gets full, it greatly slows down your computer.
On the other hand, you want to have your photos easily available to view, share with friends and family, and edit or print them. Your images have to be easily accessible to you, so the computer’s hard drive seems to be a good option, right?
There are better options than this! What if your computer crashes? Or your laptop goes missing? How will you be able to restore all of those priceless images? Let’s take a few moments and learn about the best practice for storing digital photos.
Generally speaking, I am very paranoid when it comes to hard drives (I’ve had two of my hard drives crash), which is why I always make backups of my important documents on one or two external hard drives and then make a backup of my backups in a Cloud service such as Flickr, Dropbox or Google Drive. Cloud Storage is very affordable nowadays, and I hope it gets even better soon.
Cloud Storage
You can purchase a 1 to 2 Terabyte external hard drive from any electronic store. Before purchasing, I recommend researching online and reading reviews, as not all external hard drives function similarly. Some of them have better quality than others.
Your next step is to create a folder inside your new external hard drive and name it something you can recognize easily later, such as ‘2023 Images”. Now that you have this folder create 12 subfolders, one for each month. Next time you upload your images to your computer, plug in the external hard drive and upload your photos to one of these folders (for example, January pictures go to January Folder). You will not only be storing photos, but you will also organize them by date. Next time you look for images from February 2023, you don’t have to look through thousands of photos to find them.
External Hard Drive
Is there a recommended system for storing digital photos and organizing them?
Absolutely! Editing software such as Photoshop Bridge or Lightroom has some great features that allow you to select the destination for storing digital photos and organize them using keywords and labelling to help manage photos easily.
Even if you are still getting into editing and want to learn how to manage your digital pictures, these editing software programs can save you lots of time.
We offer private lessons for those interested in learning all the great features of the most popular programs – why not contact us and book a private class to get the most out of these time-saving features?
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Ted and the Omnilargess Team