What do you do with all your family pictures?
I think I’m much like other dads. We like taking pictures and videos of our kids growing up, their special events, family vacations, etc. It’s normal. It’s good. We need to archive the memories and leave something for our grandkids to see.
BUT, there comes a point where you realize you have well over a thousand digital pictures and videos. What do you do?
Do you just keep them on your computer hard drive? Do you put them on CDs? Do you print them out?
I’m struggling with this now. What do you guys do?
All the best
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I'm a forty-something father and husband in training. It's on the job training and I'm doing my best. I share my successes, faux pas and experiences as I try to keep my priorities straight while climbing the corporate ladder (a/k/a the rat race).
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You should definitely back them up somewhere. Just imagine if your computer crashes and you lose all of the pictures and videos. That would be devastating.
I back up all of my music, pictures, and videos on an external hard drive. I have a Mac, so I have a program called Time Machine that does all of the backing up automatically.
I struggled with this about 5 years ago. What I learned. Backing up to CDs is a bad idea. burned CDs last between 3 and 5 years depending on the quality of the medium. Thus, this is not a permanent solution.
However, as the other poster pointed out, saving them only on your computer can be a problem if you have a hard drive crash.
My solution is, as the previous commenter, to have an external drive where I archive my files periodically. I also print out the best pictures and store them. And finally, the ones that make it to my diary (which includes my blog entries, but also includes other things I don’t publish), I end up publishing along with my yearly printed version of my diaries.
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Thanks Dan and Michael! Appreciate your input.
My research into this subject also shows that backing up regularly to another medium is best. Today, an external backup seems the easiest.
However, some people suggest keeping that drive in a separate location than your computer. This provides security in case you’re burglarized or there’s a fire, God forbid.
I would back it up to DVD (refresh every now an then, DVD are cheap), keep a separate copy on a external HDD.
What I did for me, friends and family is to create a printed photo album. Yes like in the early days but not 100% similar.
Have a look at http://www.blurb.com/partner/jalbum which is only one company offering to print your books. Usually you download some client software which you use to create your layout, place the pictures, add comments, backgrounds etc. then you send it off and they send the printed book to you. Have a look at local drug stores, photo shops etc for similar offers, or search the net.
Another option would be to sign up to flickr or a similar service and upload all the pictures you want to “archive”. As far as I know you can keep them “private”.
I have a dual problem in this area. We have MANY film prints, some of which have found their way into one of the myriad scrapbooks my wife has made. I’d love to digitize the negatives, but haven’t wanted to sheel out the money for a slide/film scanner.
We also have over 10,000 digital pictures. For these, I’m using the multiple hard drive method. I have a complete set on a network drive (can hold two hard drives), and another complete set on my laptop.
I’m planning on publishing a lot of family pictures on flickr and password protecting them. This way my family can pick and choose, print what they want, etc.
Another option for long term storage is to subscribe to an online backup. I don’t know too much about these, but they are growing in popularity. This would be a great way to get them off-site in case of major disaster. At least with digital medium, the ability to easily duplicate and back-up exists. With film, backing up your images would be VERY costly and difficult.
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Consider me kind of paranoid about losing our photos. I backup to an external hard drive AND to our laptop AND send the best photos to an online service like Shutterfly.
I print the best pictures on 4×6 prints, plus we make a Photo Book through Shutterfly for vacations and other special events.
On top of all that, I’m looking into an online backup service. I have over 12,000 pictures and 120GB of music. The service I’m looking at is Mozy.com. They are well reviewed and only$4.95 a month for unlimited backup. I think $60 a year is a fair price to pay for peace of mind.