Looking for the best way to organize your phone pics, get them off your phone, save them, and keep them, then this is the best way to archive digital photos.
The beautiful thing about digital photos and cell phone pictures is that they are super easy to take, upload, share online, and enjoy over and over again!
My family loves looking back at photos, and especially digital videos, we have of my kids as babies, doing new things, taking those first steps, and saying adorable words. One of my daughters asks to view them all the time!
We’ve tried to keep our digital photos organized on our computer by months and years, event, and purpose. And it’s worked out pretty well to help us find the photo or video we want, when we want it.
But, all 35,000+ digital photos and videos we have currently on our computer are not safe.
And that is a terrifying thought. Because I don’t want to lose precious memories!
I’ve lost images and videos through the years as we switched to a new desktop computer, switched cell phones, and moved around hard-drives from one apartment home to another. I’m not sure where all the pictures are that I took during college are, or from high school….
Because back in college and high school I didn’t ever back them up with a cloud service (where they even available back then?), and thought that jump drives and external hard drives or even burning them onto a CD would keep them safe.
I know I’ve lost a few of those phone SD cards through moves because they are so small. And I haven’t tried to access most of my external hard drives in years.
But, apparently jump drives, flash drives, burned CDs and burned DVDs, and even external hard-drives do not last forever. In fact, most end up being corrupted and susceptible to data loss after only a few years. I graduated high school more than 11 years ago. I graduated college more than 7 years ago.
I don’t want to lose these pictures during a hard drive crash on my computer some day. Or from a computer virus. Especially because I have printed off VERY few of the 35,000+ photos currently on my computer.
But, every week in the United States, 140,000 hard drives crash (Source: Mozy by Dell), and 31% of all PC users suffer data loss each year (Source: Gartner Technology).
Research).
I don’t want to lose those videos of first steps and first words and first songs and made up bedtime stories. I want to know the best way to store digital photos forever.
And that’s why I decided to start backing up my photos finally!
Best Way to Keep and Organize Digital Photos
Google Photos
I was recently prompted to finally sync my phone pictures and videos to Google Photos, as well as sync all of the digital photos and images on my computer to Google Photos too.
The great thing about Google Photos is that it’s free (though images are compressed to a lower resolution unless you pay for the service) and I can access them anywhere I can login to my Google Account. Plus, it automatically creates fun videos and animations for me from my photos and videos, which is fun and convenient!
Isn’t my son hilarious??
Honestly, it’s just something I should have been doing years ago!
Another perk is that this frees up space on my cell phone. I can safely delete many of my cell phone pictures and videos, knowing they are saved in the cloud.
However, cloud service isn’t actually safe either. 15% of business cloud users have been hacked.
There’s always terms and clauses and they can lose your data and there is nothing you can really do about it.
Best Way to Print Your Digital Photos
Lastly, one of the best things you can do after using a cloud service like Google Photos (which is free) is to backup your files, and putting them on a long-term external non-online device like a MDISC, the next thing to do is actually print off your favorite photos!
I have been terrible about this. Very terrible. We’ve printed very few of our photos over the years and do not have any photo albums! We have a few pictures on the walls, and that’s about it!
It’s my goal to start using Chatbooks to automatically send and print photos every month in order to remedy this. I don’t have the time to spend creating photo books, so automatic is pretty great. Each book is also only $8 with free shipping! I can afford that!
Download the Chatbooks app on Google Play or iTunes to get started.
I’m thankful for the recent prompting to really archive my digital photos the best way possible, as well as back them up with a cloud service like Google Photos, and to get me to finally print photos regularly too. I love taking photos and videos and I love feeling secure that I won’t lose them accidentally or randomly in case of computer viruses, or whatever!
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Sarah says
I struggle with this too! One thing about putting photos in the cloud and using a sync service is that if you delete them from your phone won’t they also be updated/deleted on the cloud?
Always wonder about that!
Katelyn Fagan says
No! Not necessarily! It’s often a matter of how you set up the services and what you decide to do when you delete from either the cloud or your device if it will delete from both.