who would YOU go about organizing years of digital photos?

[Anonymous]

Also, if any of these services ends — how will you download them in a reasonable time.

Google takeout works pretty well, but downloading hundreds of Gigs would be a task.

[Anonymous]

I use amazon photos- free backup with Prime. In my free time, I go through by month and add the best photos to a separate album I make photo books by school year. I the export the album to my desktop and then upload to Adorama. Not the best interface for photo books, but the quality is amazing.

[Anonymous]

I’m a PP but this thread has inspired me to look more into photo storage as my iPhone is constantly full.

I’ve decided to auto update everything to Google Photo, then quickly go through and delete all the crap (screenshots, random info and websites), and then reupload the remaining good photos (kid and family pictures) to Amazon Prime photo storage. Then delete all pics from my phone. Now I just need to keep t up...

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I use amazon photos- free backup with Prime. In my free time, I go through by month and add the best photos to a separate album I make photo books by school year. I the export the album to my desktop and then upload to Adorama. Not the best interface for photo books, but the quality is amazing.

So what happens if you stop paying $120 year?

[Anonymous]

I used to make a yearbook album each year with the highlights and then a more specific photo album for important events (graduations). I did this on whatever the photo program was called that used to come on Macs.

Then Google Photos came out. It changed the game for me. 1) It's free unlimited storage.
2) It automatically uploads from my phone.
3) I can access it via the website.
4) It automatically creates albums, videos, and collages.
5) You can search by just about anything: person, place, things in the photo (dogs, park, lake)

The day after our trip to California, I got a notification that there was a video and album ready. It made a really neat 2 minute video of the highlights of our trip as well as an album of most of the landmarks we saw. I added a few and took a few pics out. It's really cool.

[Anonymous]

When I’m bored (waiting at doctors offices or such) I scroll through my photos and delete duplicates. If you keep up with it it doesn’t get too consuming.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I use amazon photos- free backup with Prime. In my free time, I go through by month and add the best photos to a separate album I make photo books by school year. I the export the album to my desktop and then upload to Adorama. Not the best interface for photo books, but the quality is amazing.

So what happens if you stop paying $120 year?

They are saved on an external hard drive. I just use the amazon photos app to do the organizing, since it’s on my phone and automatically backs up anything on it.

[Anonymous]

Photos from my actual camera - when I upload them to my computer, they all go in files by month/year. So I have folders labeled January 2019, February 2019, etc. Within those folders I sometimes make sub folders if I have a collection of photos that go together (i.e. Beach Trip, DH Birthday, Family Visit, etc). If I want to print pics, I upload just the ones I want printed to snapfish, shutterfly, walmart, target, whatever and print the photos.

Videos from my actual camera - these are less frequent. When I upload these, they go in a separate folder called Videos and are named by date followed by (description of what's in video).

Photso and video from my phone - these are automatically backed up to google. Every once in awhile, I pull them all off and save them to my external hard drive so I have a backup in case Google goes down or they stop providing the service.

I used to make photo albums of important events like our annual beach trip but I've fallen so far behind. I am committed to sorting through photos and printing hard copies sometime in the near future of the ones I love and want to frame or put in an album.

[Anonymous]

I have used Shutterfly for 10 years-- I make one book for each year that I work on/update every month (I used to wait until the end of the year but it's much easier and more efficient to spend a few hours a month uploading and arranging pictures, etc.).

The way I stay organized is that I go through my photos periodically and mark my "favorites" so when I sit down to do Shutterfly, I only upload the best/favorite ones.

I also realized that Shutterfly (in addition to page limits-I always buy the maximum amount of extra pages) limits how many photos you can load per book to 1000. To get around that, I will take sets of pictures and put them into a collage that then becomes 1 picture when I upload it to Shutterfly. Saves space and doesn't force me to always choose my most fav pic, i.e., I might take 4 shots of my DS that are similar but slightly different and instead of only preserving one, I just put them all in a collage and can look back at all of them in our yearly photo album.

I know it will be a lot of work to go back and organize now but if you just start with segregating or marking your favorites and then uploading, it will be much easier.

[Anonymous]

For a different perspective - Adobe Lightroom, or the open source flavors - darktable.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I used to make a yearbook album each year with the highlights and then a more specific photo album for important events (graduations). I did this on whatever the photo program was called that used to come on Macs.

Then Google Photos came out. It changed the game for me. 1) It's free unlimited storage.
2) It automatically uploads from my phone.
3) I can access it via the website.
4) It automatically creates albums, videos, and collages.
5) You can search by just about anything: person, place, things in the photo (dogs, park, lake)

The day after our trip to California, I got a notification that there was a video and album ready. It made a really neat 2 minute video of the highlights of our trip as well as an album of most of the landmarks we saw. I added a few and took a few pics out. It's really cool.

Is there a way to print into a photobook?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I used to make a yearbook album each year with the highlights and then a more specific photo album for important events (graduations). I did this on whatever the photo program was called that used to come on Macs.

Then Google Photos came out. It changed the game for me. 1) It's free unlimited storage.
2) It automatically uploads from my phone.
3) I can access it via the website.
4) It automatically creates albums, videos, and collages.
5) You can search by just about anything: person, place, things in the photo (dogs, park, lake)

The day after our trip to California, I got a notification that there was a video and album ready. It made a really neat 2 minute video of the highlights of our trip as well as an album of most of the landmarks we saw. I added a few and took a few pics out. It's really cool.

Is there a way to print into a photobook?

Yes. They do photobook printing as well, and there's a template for the books embedded into the app and website that guides you through the process.

[Anonymous]

As an amateur photographer and professional IT person, here are my suggestions:

- print anything that you truly care about (long-term digital storage is an unknown); use an actual photo lab that prints on silver-halide paper, not an ink jet printer
- store the original, unmodified version of every picture, sorted into directories by date
- keep at least three different backup copies (cloud, off-site, home) and keep several versions of each of these (i.e. do not just use one external hard disk for backups and keep re-writing to it; this would be useless if corruption occurred in the backup process and would also not help if data corruption is discovered later)

Although I work with computers every day, I shoot most my photographs on film, as I prefer the look and don't trust longer-term electronic storage.