I would venture to say that everyone you know owns a camera and has taken more photos in the past 2 years than the rest of their lives. I take about 1000 photos or more a month and that amounts to lots of pictures. Not to count the boxes of photos I have in my closet that I have yet to digitize and put into my Lightroom Catalog.
They are memories of family, friends and places I have been. My hope is that they will be passed on from generation to generation the same as all the photos that I inherited from my ancestors. Now that we are in the digital age it is more convenient to take and show our photos and also much more plentiful. So what happens to all these photos as time goes on. The files keep building and we have to keep expanding our hard drive space and come up with a plan on how to keep them in a viable state. I enjoy spending time looking at them and reliving the memories they invoke. So what do we do with all these photos?
In order to keep them there has to be a plan, so this is what I do.
We all know people that have had their hard drives crash. Someone once told me that a photo isn’t real until it is in 3 places. One on my computer hard drive, one on a backup hard drive and one on a hard drive that is off site. The reason I do this is because everything mechanical breaks and the reason to keep one offsite is in case my house were to burn down or a thief broke into my house and decided to steal my computer.
I use Adobe’s Lightroom which gives me easy access to all my photos. and I make a backup whenever I add new photos. I make an offsite backup about once a week. For this I use a program called Chronosync which is only $40 and you get free updates for life. It has been a very good investment.
This clip from Mad Men will show you what all the fuss is about.
And here are some of my memories.
