How do you archive your digital photo library?

S

slagar

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As a single guy it was manageable to just migrate my iphoto library from computer to computer, version to version, with a single backup on an external drive and all was well. Fast forward and now married with two children, shit is out of control!

I'm wondering how you guys manage your digital photo archives. I'm wary of cloud based solutions for the most part because I do not trust companies like Google, Facebook, et al... but it sure would be nice to feed the photos into some sort of centralized repository so that no matter where or how I'm importing them they can be sorted and accessed easily. Ultimately, this would lead to being able to keep track and organize my photos (and videos) better so that it's easy to print some hard copy photo books, family christmas cards, quickly send pics to the grandparents, etc. without it becoming a massive affair.

- What program(s) or services do you use or like the most?
- What's your digital photo workflow?
- What level of backing up do you consider sufficient?
 
jooka

jooka

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Curious why you don't trust the cloud based solutions? Pretty sure they will out last any drive solution you can come up with. Your pretty much stuck with hard drives or writable media.
 
Joeboo

Joeboo

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Ive been using Dropbox for several years. The instant I, my wife, or my mother take a picture with our phones if uploads to Dropbox for safe keeping. I manually sync our digital camera at the first of every month. I wish digital cameras had wifi capibilities to just sync automatically when they are on a network.

Luckily I currently have around 55GB of free Dropbox space Thanks to various promotions but if I ever fill that I might seriously consider Google drive as it is much cheaper than Dropbox one you have to start paying for extra space
 
K

Kedwyn

Silver Squire
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I use Dropbox as my active shots folder. Take a pic or video and it goes there. I also generally upload videos to Youtube we want to keep and share right from the phone since those tend to be large and stuff we don't want to lose.

NAS acts as a primary storage drive. When I go through the drop box folder I delete the shit we don't want to keep, move the stuff we do want to keep to the NAS and then I zip it all up and upload the zip file to the cloud. I do this two or three times a year.

If the NAS goes tits up everything is still there either sorted or unsorted but still there. If Drop box goes tits up I still have the photos and videos on the phones or on Tube since we don't delete those until I move them to the NAS or upload them. Couple of steps but its pretty simple to do and all I have to do is move a few files between folders on my PC and drop box does the rest.
 
lurkingdirk

lurkingdirk

AssHat Taint
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I own a web domain that has unlimited storage. I upload each month's photos into a dated file folder. The site is paid for through 2050, and I'm sure we'll find even more permanent solutions before then. Owning a website through various hosting services is cheap and easy. And accessible from anywhere.
 
Vaclav

Vaclav

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How out of control we talking about? Some recent phones can manage 150 GB or so now with a microSD.

And of course any on the microSD would be trivial to migrate and of course microSDs are swappable.

So cloud solutions aren't absolutely necessary if you go that sort of route. But they're the most elegant solution though.
 
Joeboo

Joeboo

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My only overall strategy is to have a minimum of 2 places they are stored, and to make sure they aren't both physically in the same place (i.e. if your house burns down or floods, it doesnt do you any good if both hard drives are in your house)

Keep a hard drive at your office and one at home, or use 1 cloud-based solution + 1 home hard drive, etc.
 
Crone

Crone

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I signed up for a Flickr account, but it doesn't automatically upload my new photos unless I specifically open the app. This is on an iPhone. Does Dropbox do that? Or do you have to still open the Dropbox app for the pictures to start uploading?
 
Noodleface

Noodleface

A Mod Real Quick
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All of our phones, desktop, and laptops/tablets are synced with a single dropbox account. Works wonderfully.
 
Lenas

Lenas

Trump's Staff
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Every photo I take is automatically saved to OneDrive. Haven't had to manage a photo in years.
 
Jysin

Jysin

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Love my Dropbox! It's one of those things I configured on my Samsung Galaxy S4 when I bought it a year ago and had completely forgotten about. Typical "set it and forget it" technology. A couple weeks back I was on an overnight camping trip at the beach, got a bit too wasted to realize I still had my phone in my pocket while swimming in the ocean. Phone was wrecked and micro SD card was corrupted. I had some photos from a few weeks prior on trip to New Zealand that I thought I had lost forever. After half a day of trying to restore the SD card, I remembered the Dropbox account. Logged in and voila! Every single picture and video I had taken had been auto-saved.

Can't recommend anything more!
 
Crone

Crone

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Jysin_sl said:
Love my Dropbox! It's one of those things I configured on my Samsung Galaxy S4 when I bought it a year ago and had completely forgotten about. Typical "set it and forget it" technology. A couple weeks back I was on an overnight camping trip at the beach, got a bit too wasted to realize I still had my phone in my pocket while swimming in the ocean. Phone was wrecked and micro SD card was corrupted. I had some photos from a few weeks prior on trip to New Zealand that I thought I had lost forever. After half a day of trying to restore the SD card, I remembered the Dropbox account. Logged in and voila! Every single picture and video I had taken had been auto-saved.

Can't recommend anything more!
Click to expand...
So it automatically uploads to Dropbox, and doesn't require interaction on your part, like opening the dropbox app, to upload the photos.

That's good to know. I think I'm going to switch from Flickr to Dropbox.
 
Lanx

Lanx

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every cloud based solution pales now compared to google. recent google price drops are insane, 100gb a month for 2bucks? honestly whose family pictures/videos are that much? (i don't have a kid yet, so i may be talking out my ass, friends say you get really camera crazy when you get one) but my wedding photos/videos are like 20gigs (in raw).

i work with a few different ppl, so i use a few different cloud based.

for personal, i use gdrive, 2bucks a month for 100gb (i think they give 15gigs free)

dropbox is ONLY good if you were able to get others to get dropbox to get free gigs, otherwise it's "ONLY" 2gigs free for life and 10bucks for 100gb a month (been using dropbox for years, sync between 3 computers, 2 are offsite)

i've been using copy.com to share between ppl recently, they give 15gigs free and 5gigs per shared computer or something like that, they're my number 2 pick.

i use others like box.com (don't really like it) and recently used spideroak, this one i don't recommend, weird install app/program and using virtual folders/mydocs ( i prefer just to have 1 directory to sync, you can do it, but you have to set it up)

i've tried others like amazon/cx/sugarsync, (i do use one drive but i use it exclusively for microsoft note)

so my preferred is
google drive
copy.com
dropbox
 
Joeboo

Joeboo

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Yeah, I only use dropbox because Samsung had some promotions to get a ton of free space for 2 years when you buy their products(and we have 2 Samsung phones and a tablet) so I get like 65GB free through mid-2015 at the moment. Once all that expires I'll be moving over to Google Drive, even though last time I used it, it's not as streamlined and automated as dropbox. You have to actually open the google drive app to upload pictures, it isn't just automatic, which sucks.
 
Crone

Crone

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joeboo_sl said:
Yeah, I only use dropbox because Samsung had some promotions to get a ton of free space for 2 years when you buy their products(and we have 2 Samsung phones and a tablet) so I get like 65GB free through mid-2015 at the moment. Once all that expires I'll be moving over to Google Drive, even though last time I used it, it's not as streamlined and automated as dropbox. You have to actually open the google drive app to upload pictures, it isn't just automatic, which sucks.
Click to expand...
It's this way with Flickr as well, which was annoying. That convenience may just be worth the price of Dropbox, but who knows.

How is Dropbox and Google Drive with viewing the pictures? I assume very easy through their apps? What about sharing? We setup a Flickr account to share pictures of our kid. Dropbox make it just as easy to share a picture? or album?
 
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