Where to store photos?

first78

I've got several thousand photos on my desktop and just wondered how best to store them? I've uploaded a lot to Facebook but have no idea how many I can have on there and whether they will be there forever. Any suggestions on how to store them please.

wongataa

More than one external hard drive is best. Keep the drives in different locations. Rotate the drive locations periodically as you update the backups.

Facebook is not a good backup option.

Vale46

Please don't rely on Facebook to store them. Anything could happen in the future which might make them unavailable to you or your family. Also the quality is not the same. They down grade the image when you upload them to Facebook etc.
We use an external hard drive to back up such things and then keep it at someone else's house for extra protection (fire/flood/theft etc). They're reasonably priced considering how precious photographs are & how much you'd have to pay for someone to even look at your computer let alone fix it if something happened!

lazer

I have mine stored on my desktop and backed up onto a hard drive and i also print an annual photobook

first78

Where would be the best place to buy an external hard drive? Can you take these drives to the photo booth places in Asdas, Tesco etc to print copies?

Vale46

You can buy them lots of places I wouldn't worry where within reason!
I wouldn't take the external hard drive to places to print copies even if it's possible. It's more for back up then leave well alone until the next back up. It's not something to carry about in your bag!
The photographs will still be on your computer so I'd just carry on using whatever you use now, USB flash drive, memory card etc. to get them printed off.

Nada666

Don't forget the most obvious and most convenient place - in shoe boxes and albums as physical prints.

A thousand prints for £50 or £70. Arrange and re-arrange to your heart's content.

mr_fishbulb

If your photos are from cameras with less than 16 megapixels, Google Photos offers unlimited storage in the cloud

shopbot

The most robust advice is the 3:2:1 principle.
3 copies of your photos. In 2 Locations. 1 of which is the cloud.

Storage is cheap compared to losing your photos. Get two USB sticks or external drives. Copy all of your photos to both of them. Store one with a family member or friend. This protects you against fire, flood, burglary. Remember to swap them over regularly and keep copying new photos over.

The Cloud option is because storage can fail over time. It's also a quick way of getting your photos back. Don't use services like Facebook as they compress your photos to display well on the web. You should use a free service like Dropbox, Google, Amazon or Flickr.

SB

first78

So if I store my photos on somewhere like Google, Flickr etc how do I print them when I want copies for albums or to put in frames? Sorry for the stupid questions but I'm really clueless about all this!

googler

first78 wrote: »

So if I store my photos on somewhere like Google, Flickr etc how do I print them when I want copies for albums or to put in frames? Sorry for the stupid questions but I'm really clueless about all this!

These places aren't primary storage.

You keep your photos in their original format by merely copying them from one flash card, memory stick, hard drive, etc. to another. That's your primary storage, where you still have them as your original JPG, RAW file, or whatever.

Print them from your own storage devices.