We are all photographers and as such we all take and have hundreds if not thousands of photographs. But, where do you keep them? Flickr?. Amazon Photos? 500px?. Smugmug? . Or do you print them/ store them on drives / cloud or wherever.
It’s a problem that crops up with me from time to time. I currently have Flickr but rarely use it and a Pro membership comes with around £120 cost for a 2 year membership. Any thoughts, opinions and suggestions most welcome.
I do the same as Andrew. External hard drive plus a Cloud service. I use a Mac Desktop, so I divide my Photos albums into years and within them into months for ease of reference and loading speed. I also print out collages and some solo prints.
My approach is similar to that of Casablanca @casablanca (and Andrew @allsop ): I have a very similar hierarchical cataloguing system with years, months and then topics and dates inside months. Inside each month folder I have a running Word document with notes relating to the photos for that month (eg details of places, people etc, memory triggers, idiosyncratic odds and sods). I back all this up on hard drives and to the Cloud. And I keep all my SD cards without overwriting them, just in case. Works for me. I can usually find what I want within a reasonably short time and I don't lose stuff.
For the price of a cloud album, I store my photos on one external hard drive and back it up to another. Mine are store in chronological order. Not the best way to do it, but I'll have them there.
I do similar with dedicated hard drives, months, years etc. However, I also have a separate folder that says 'family' and sub folders for special gatherings/holidays etc. as at my age I now forget which year we went where, did what and with whom ha ha. I also have a sort of framed collage wall in the kitchen of my favourite pictures that I have printed and change it about every 4 - 6 months.
@danette I'll need to check this - but when you're looking at a screen of thumbnails, I think if you right click on a photo and see "Properties" at the bottom, and click on that, there's a field you can make notes in.
I upload all mine to Flickr, not so much as storage, but because of "fair's fair" (if I want to search for photos of something on the internet, I need people to have uploaded them, so if people search for subjects I've photoed, I try to offer them. [However Flickr isn't high up in search results].
Re storage: photos remain on the SD card and are copied to PC. I've just started keeping SD cards, rather than formatting and using again, because I'm no longer copying from phone/cameras to my laptop on a daily basis as I once did.
On my PC photos go into a daily folder named with places visited/ things done/ people seen. If, for example, I have taken lots of photos of different flowers, I will add the flower's name to the photo number.
Just musing: I can't easily find things on the phone because I keep it as just one massive stream and rarely tag anything.
Equally, I'd have to look through loads of SD cards ...
Perhaps I need to start backing up the daily annotated folder onto an external drive every day, rather than when I'm just freeing space.
etc etc
Lots of good ideas! I admit, my cataloging and photo record keeping is a mess. Have spent a LOT of time trying to figure out the best way to keep stuff. I do have many of my photos on MyHomeCloud, a personal server that has a cloud backup, but I am NOT organized. 😫
Thanks for all the comments here. It certainly is an interesting idea / problem a lot of us have. Right now having resisted the temptation to bother with the i cloud , i have taken the plunge and in the process of backing up all our phones, laptops and tablets. Also as i trawl back through my photos i am deleting hundreds maybe now thousands where they are either duplicates or poor shots. I have a couple of hard drives attached to my old p.c and think it’s time to revive them and back up my photos there as well. I’m also loading the more important photos i’d like to share with family and friends on to Flickr.
Just wanted to add that I keep an external hard drive and also send to Shutterfly (which is free and unlimited). I list by date and event, but also sort by topics. I then keep a list of the headings I use each year to make sure I sort the same each year. Hope this helps!
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Re storage: photos remain on the SD card and are copied to PC. I've just started keeping SD cards, rather than formatting and using again, because I'm no longer copying from phone/cameras to my laptop on a daily basis as I once did.
On my PC photos go into a daily folder named with places visited/ things done/ people seen. If, for example, I have taken lots of photos of different flowers, I will add the flower's name to the photo number.
Just musing: I can't easily find things on the phone because I keep it as just one massive stream and rarely tag anything.
Equally, I'd have to look through loads of SD cards ...
Perhaps I need to start backing up the daily annotated folder onto an external drive every day, rather than when I'm just freeing space.
etc etc