topic Re: Where do you store your photos? in General Discussion

Where do you store your photos?

John_SD — Tue, 13 Jun 2017 02:24:38 GMT

For some time, I have been concerned about proper long-term storage of my photos -- the ones that mean something to me. If you beleve like me, that photos capture a time and place in our lives and that you'd like future generations of your family to have access to them, then you begin thinking in terms of storage options.

I myself don't have any faith that any of these companies will be around 40 or 50 years from now, or that today's hardware solutions will be viable. CDs and such? They are on their way out already. Flickr (or any other Yahoo offshoot)? Don't make me laugh. Dropbox? Let's talk about it 25 years from now. SmugMug? Get real. Google Drive? Please.

All of them are fine, for now. I stash mine on Google Photos, also a temporary solution at best. But my photos that really mean something to me, I print.

Thus, I am using the only tried and true storage and retrtieval "device" that has stood the test of time. That is the photo album. Don't laugh. I have family photo albums chock full of black-and-whites from the early 1930s onward. And I am **bleep** glad I have them. There is no hardware to fail. No company to pull the plug. No technology that will fall by the wayside. For many, photo albums may be a thing of the past. For me, they contain generations of my family.

What about for you? Where do you store the photos that mean the most to you?

Re: Where do you store your photos?

Waddizzle — Tue, 13 Jun 2017 02:42:57 GMT

I am no fan of social media, and "free" web storage. So, I've created my own personal cloud solution.

I use a Western Digital MyCloud device to share photos. It is a personal cloud device with 4TB of storage. I also have a couple of Raid 1 Servers running Windows Server 2008 R2. One for backing up laptops and tablet devices, one for storing files that have been imported into Lightroom.

Each of my sons have MyCloud devices. And, we share space, so that all of your digital images are not stored at one location.

Re: Where do you store your photos?

John_SD — Tue, 13 Jun 2017 21:01:50 GMT

@Waddizzle wrote:
I am no fan of social media, and "free" web storage. So, I've created my own personal cloud solution.

I use a Western Digital MyCloud device to share photos. It is a personal cloud device with 4TB of storage. I also have a couple of Raid 1 Servers running Windows Server 2008 R2. One for backing up laptops and tablet devices, one for storing files that have been imported into Lightroom.

Each of my sons have MyCloud devices. And, we share space, so that all of your digital images are not stored at one location.

An interesting solution and one that I'm sure will work well for some time. Whether any of these gadget- or hardware-based solutions will still be viable in 50 years -- a short period of time, photographically -- is questionable. However, we are limited in what we can do today.

In thinking back over the matter of long-term storage, I am reminded of my dear departed old grandmother, who stored her most precious photos -- hundreds of them -- in an old suitcase. They are still in excellent conditon and were handed down to various family members, includig me.

There are photos there of my grandfather as a young man posing with his WW1 mustard-gas unit, photos of my grandmother as a little girl with a basket of chocolates she sold to passersby, Later on, photos of Depression-era neighbors gathering in the kitchen to share a large pot of stew and homemade bread, photos of "modern" times, such as me and some other kids wearing clamdiggers and playing wiffle ball, all of us looking like we dipped our heads into a barrel of Wildroot. My uncle playing pinball in a local tavern, my grandfather working hard making bathtub gin, so as to support his wife and 5 children. Photos that can't be duplicated and too valuable to be entrusted to lesser forms of technology. Speaking of those old black-and-whites, remember those ripple-cut edges? Man! You don't get that on a monitor. YMMV.

Re: Where do you store your photos?

cicopo — Tue, 13 Jun 2017 21:04:14 GMT

On lots of hard drives. Way back around 2000 I had already started worrying about this & to date there is no real answer when it comes to LONG term storage. Mediums change & the devices to read them vanish as new tech comes along. VCR's & floppy drives etc are long gone & CD's DVD's etc will be too along with the players that used them. Even file systems used change so every so often it's necessary to back up a full older drive to a newer drive using the latest file system. As for prints we don't know their lifespan either. They aren't real photos like I made in the darkroom. They are dye or ink sprayed onto a special paper but it's also not the photo paper our ancestors bought. It was the negatives that really stood the test of time if looked after properly & digital files simply may not make it long term.

Re: Where do you store your photos?

Waddizzle — Tue, 13 Jun 2017 22:06:28 GMT

@John_SD wrote:
@Waddizzle wrote:
I am no fan of social media, and "free" web storage. So, I've created my own personal cloud solution.

I use a Western Digital MyCloud device to share photos. It is a personal cloud device with 4TB of storage. I also have a couple of Raid 1 Servers running Windows Server 2008 R2. One for backing up laptops and tablet devices, one for storing files that have been imported into Lightroom.

Each of my sons have MyCloud devices. And, we share space, so that all of your digital images are not stored at one location.
An interesting solution and one that I'm sure will work well for some time. Whether any of these gadget- or hardware-based solutions will still be viable in 50 years -- a short period of time, photographically -- is questionable. However, we are limited in what we can do today.

In thinking back over the matter of long-term storage, I am reminded of my dear departed old grandmother, who stored her most precious photos -- hundreds of them -- in an old suitcase. They are still in excellent conditon and were handed down to various family members, includig me.

There are photos there of my grandfather as a young man posing with his WW1 mustard-gas unit, photos of my grandmother as a little girl with a basket of chocolates she sold to passersby, Later on, photos of Depression-era neighbors gathering in the kitchen to share a large pot of stew and homemade bread, photos of "modern" times, such as me and some other kids wearing clamdiggers and playing wiffle ball, all of us looking like we dipped our heads into a barrel of Wildroot. My uncle playing pinball in a local tavern, my grandfather working hard making bathtub gin, so as to support his wife and 5 children. Photos that can't be duplicated and too valuable to be entrusted to lesser forms of technology. Speaking of those old black-and-whites, remember those ripple-cut edges? Man! You don't get that on a monitor. YMMV.

I assembled this storage system for CAD files, not photographs.

Hard copy prints just might be one of the better long term storage media. The quality of photo paper has improved significantly in recent years, going from a few decades to a few centuries.

Re: Where do you store your photos?

ebiggs1 — Wed, 14 Jun 2017 15:45:43 GMT

"... when it comes to LONG term storage."

There is only one answer available to us at the present time. And, you are on the right path with a paper print. However even with archival paper and ink this too has problems. I currently have 5 two TB hard drives that hold my photos. There is some 500 thousand (500,000 in case you missed that) pics on them now. This makes a paper print unfeasible and not economical in any real sense of the thought. To top that off, I am retired and don't shoot anywhere near what I used to.

I am almost to the the point of saying, "Pull the plug on them." Who will ever want them anyway or could go through all of them? But I will probably leave it up to the kids to decide!

Re: Where do you store your photos?

John_SD — Wed, 14 Jun 2017 16:41:39 GMT

@ebiggs1 wrote:

I currently have 5 two TB hard drives that hold my photos. There is some 500 thousand (500,000 in case you missed that) pics on them now. This makes a paper print unfeasible and not economical in any real sense of the thought.

Print out your best few thousand of the photos, the ones that would mean the most to family members in the future. It's quite feasible. Don't entrust your valuable work to hardware devices that are prone to failure and won't even be able to be read 50 years from now. And forget backing up one hardware device to another. All will fail for one reason or another. PRINT.

Re: Where do you store your photos?

ebiggs1 — Wed, 14 Jun 2017 17:21:54 GMT

" Don't entrust your valuable work to hardware devices that are prone to failure and won't even be able to be read 50 years from now"

I her ya man. Believe me. Anything made by the hand of man will eventually fail.

"...forget backing up one hardware device to another."

Stopped doing that about 15 years ago. I am retired now an no longer guarantee work to be kept for a period of time.

"...the ones that would mean the most to family members in the future."

And here-in lies the problem! My 'extended' family includes several thousand kids. I am to the point where you can't even go through the photos to tell which is a real keeper. I already do a critical delete after import into LR. When I retired I had no idea this would escalate into the problem it has. I thought I was done.

You are spot on about using archival paper and ink. The only real answer.

Re: Where do you store your photos?

RobertTheFat — Thu, 15 Jun 2017 03:01:45 GMT

@John_SD wrote:
@ebiggs1 wrote:

I currently have 5 two TB hard drives that hold my photos. There is some 500 thousand (500,000 in case you missed that) pics on them now. This makes a paper print unfeasible and not economical in any real sense of the thought.
Print out your best few thousand of the photos, the ones that would mean the most to family members in the future. It's quite feasible. Don't entrust your valuable work to hardware devices that are prone to failure and won't even be able to be read 50 years from now. And forget backing up one hardware device to another. All will fail for one reason or another. PRINT.

The flaw in that logic is that while any hardware device will eventually fail, files don't have to remain on the same device indefinitely. If your backups are properly managed, your files will always exist on two or more devices that are geographically separated and are nearer the beginning than the end of their life expectancy.

Re: Where do you store your photos?

John_SD — Thu, 15 Jun 2017 04:59:45 GMT

@RobertTheFat wrote:

The flaw in that logic is that while any hardware device will eventually fail, files don't have to remain on the same device indefinitely. If your backups are properly managed, your files will always exist on two or more devices that are geographically separated and are nearer the beginning than the end of their life expectancy.

While our current technology may well see all of us through for the forseeable future, if not the remainder of our lives, my concern is more long term, as I intend to pass photos on to family members.

Bob, I believe that regardless of the number of hardware backups we have or their geographical location, they will eventually fail or "age out" and become unsupportable and unusable. In time the technology will fade away and render the photos irretrievable to future generations. True, one could hope that those who take over the devices after we're gone, if they are so inclined, would have the interest, technical know-how and foresight to move the photos off of them onto more modern hardware. But I wouldn't want to count on that.

Therefore I do print the photos that mean the most to me and hope that future generations of the family find them as interesting as I found my grandmother's old photos she had stored in a suitcase. That being said, when it comes to photo management, I am definitely one who is a "serial deleter," and so a lot of stuff I shoot I don't keep. At the other extreme are the guys who keep every junk shot they take as though it were a priceless artifact.

Don't get me wrong, I realize that it is not practical to attempt to print out hundreds of thousands or milions of photos. And there may not be any one-size-fits-all solution. So what works for me may not work for others. Still, I will see your various hard drives and backups and raise you a dozen photo albums and a suitcase. 🙂 Let's plan to meet back here in about 75 years and check the contents of our chosen "storage devices." 🙂

Re: Where do you store your photos?

ebiggs1 — Thu, 15 Jun 2017 13:01:36 GMT

B from B,

I don't do backups, well in the real sense of the word anyway. All the photos go onto one of the 5 external HD's after LR. After I retired I stopped keeping jobs (guaranteed) for 6 months. Actually I kept them until I ran out of room on a backup drive usually well more than 6 months. There was always two copies of every photo.

The big problem is there are so many it becomes impossible to even go through them. And it is ever growing daily! I had no idea it would come to this after retirement. I think pulling the plug is the answer. Prints were made of the ones wanted at the time.

Re: Where do you store your photos?

RobertTheFat — Thu, 15 Jun 2017 13:50:24 GMT

Ernie and John,

Before you place too much confidence in printing as a long-term storage methodology, look into how many town governments in the U.S. have had all their records destroyed by fire. And into the number of companies that ceased to exist on September 11, 2001 because their backups weren't in order.

Re: Where do you store your photos?

JacoMedia0113 — Tue, 27 Jun 2017 13:59:09 GMT

I have had the exact same concerns. What I did was bought a simple seagate 4 terabyte external hard drive. Then created a folder called photos. Inside of that I put film and digital since I shoot both. Inside digital is the year and inside of that is the month and then inside of that is the day number and a very short description. Inside of that is 2 folders named edited and original placing all the photos in original folder and then select/edited photos in the edited folder. You can also skip putting the year month day thing and just put the date in numbers (ex. 5/12/17) with a short description. It depends how much you shoot.

Re: Where do you store your photos?

JacoMedia0113 — Tue, 27 Jun 2017 14:02:46 GMT

You can make one print with like 50 pictures on it. Ive done that in the past and its pretty fun

Re: Where do you store your photos?

Mr_Fusion — Mon, 07 Aug 2017 15:49:54 GMT

I'm agreeing with Robert here.

First paper is not an end all answer as it too has its own problems. Paper will become brittle and ink fades. Most inks use dyes for their colors. Look at your favorite old denim jeans for why dyes are not a first choice. Then add in the cost of printing each picture. depending on the machine, 8 X 10s will cost you roughly $1 - $2 per page by the time you add in paper, ink, and machine. Plus time. Then there is the physical size, moisture, heat, hungry bugs, etc. as long term storage hazards. While synthetic materials offer longer term storage options, they are expensive and not as high quality.

In the future I assume that someone will develop a file format that replaces jpg and tiff. Because of the vast number of files out there, any new file system will also include some backward compatibly or easy to transfer mechanism. No future system could ever gain a foothold if it orphaned trillions of files.

Re: Where do you store your photos?

veer6 — Fri, 25 Aug 2017 14:46:11 GMT

On lots of sd cards

Re: Where do you store your photos?

John_SD — Fri, 25 Aug 2017 15:51:24 GMT

You guys who are relying on disk drives and SD cards for long-term storage are looking at disaster in one fell swoop when those devices fail.

Re: Where do you store your photos?

RobertTheFat — Fri, 25 Aug 2017 18:25:49 GMT

@John_SD wrote:
You guys who are relying on disk drives and SD cards for long-term storage are looking at disaster in one fell swoop when those devices fail.

Er ... That's why we put them on three or more geographically separated devices. (Everybody does that; right?)

But I agree with you regarding SD cards. No way are they a reliable medium for long-term protection. It's easy enough for a few of them to simply fall into the wastebasket and not be noticed.

Re: Where do you store your photos?

John_SD — Fri, 25 Aug 2017 19:31:02 GMT

@RobertTheFat wrote:
@John_SD wrote:
You guys who are relying on disk drives and SD cards for long-term storage are looking at disaster in one fell swoop when those devices fail.
Er ... That's why we put them on three or more geographically separated devices. (Everybody does that; right?)

But I agree with you regarding SD cards. No way are they a reliable medium for long-term protection. It's easy enough for a few of them to simply fall into the wastebasket and not be noticed.

Three or more hardware devices in differnt geographical locations? That merely multiples your problem by 3, in my view, Bob. Hardware fails, period. And it's not a matter of if, but when.

I have family albums full of black and whites that go back to the early 1930's. The photos remain in top-notch condition because they are protected (and not handled individually). While disk storage may be fine for now, think of the future. Disk drives aren't going to last for nigh on a century, and your future family members will have no clue about the photos that mean the most to you today, because they will be gone, along with a valuable trove of memories from a different world. Put your favorites in photo albums for all to enjoy, now and in the future.

Photo albums don't require IDs or passwords to open up, nor family members 70 years from who know nothing of such things. After you're gone, who will maintain the accounts where your photos reside today?

While photo albums themselves may need replacing after many decades, the photos will still be in excellent condition. Printing from a commercial firm and proper photo storage is the way to go.

Re: Where do you store your photos?

Waddizzle — Fri, 25 Aug 2017 21:50:01 GMT

@John_SD wrote:
You guys who are relying on disk drives and SD cards for long-term storage are looking at disaster in one fell swoop when those devices fail.

I shoot hundreds of photos every week. What is your suggestion?