My nephew Julius demonstrating how photo storage makes me feel! Let’s just lay down on the floor and pretend we don’t have a problem!
I am embarrassed to admit that I currently have 21,000 photos on my Macbook. My Macbook isn’t terribly happy about it, as you might imagine, and it’s the number one thing Michael nags me about whenever he tries to use my computer. I back up some of them to a hard drive, but the hard drive isn’t big enough to hold all 21,000 photos, so some of them remain un-backed-up as my Macbook inches toward its fourth year of service.
I’m certain I don’t need all those 21,000 photos, but the idea of going through them and even just deleting duplicates or near-duplicates makes me want to crawl under my bed and never come out.
I’ve spent a little time this week trying to back up photos year by year into the Amazon Cloud, mostly because I was ordering a new, much bigger hard drive to hopefully deal with part of my problem, and Amazon started shouting at me about their Unlimited Photo Storage for $11.99/year. Trouble is, it takes bloody forever to upload so many photos! A week has passed and I think it’s backed up about 5,000 photos but seriously slowed down the internet in all of China Village in the process!
So I’m kind of just wondering what all of you nice people do with your photos? How do you back them up? And if you’ve ever gotten to the point where you have 21,000 photos, what did you do with them all? How did you find your way out of that black hole and into to a good photo storage system?
And don’t even get me started on photo books. I would love to print some of these 21,000 photos so someone other than just me could enjoy them. But where to start and how to choose? And once you choose, you have to design it and print it and honestly, who has the time?
I’m hoping that admitting (publicly and for all the internets to see) that I have a serious problem will be a step in the right direction. And fingers crossed I’m not the only one! I’d love your tips and suggestions or maybe even an intervention?
6 Comments
Please pass on the answer when you discover it! We have a very similar problem, and as our kids grow up I’m realising how hard it is to know how to document, preserve or remember these photographic milestones. :/
O Goodness… As a former Apple store employee this makes me very anxious. I would invest in an external hard drive that uses a Thunderbolt port. Also do you use Time Machine on your mac? You Should, would need a separate external, usually suggest double the size of the current hard drive in the computer. Things like Amazon Cloud, Google Drive, and Crash Plan are great cloud based back-ups. Friend and photographer who shot our engagement photos wrote a great post on this…
http://www.maisonmeredith.com/blog/2015/4/7/rlibqzq6otjiwmm5vrmbrdupw2xzdg?rq=Back%20up
Hope this helps and back it up, please… for my soul.
Haha I didn’t mean to give you heart palpitations, Andrew!! I have ordered a 1 terabyte hard drive which will hopefully arrive in the next few days because I definitely gave up on the cloud storage for the moment. Small town internet speeds jsut weren’t cutting it! I’m not sure what kind of cord it is but I am hopeful taht it will be big enough for everything and I can resume time-machining! Wish tehre was a genius bar just for this problem so someone could set me up wtih all of it!!
If you ever have any questions feel free to email!
I had a similar situation last year and was horrified anytime I approached my 12 years of photos racking up to 30,000+, none of which were backed up. I know it sounds awful, but I would set aside a few evenings every week where I’d take 1000 photos and go through them – keeping just the good ones, so there was enough room in my external hard drive.
It took me about a month to do, but I kept putting it off for YEARS so I finally bit the bullet, but did it piece by piece instead of the entire time. I also saved to a separate folder any really funny throwback photos (looking at freshman year of college) and printed them out, put them in cute cards to old friends and sent them off for a fun little surprise for friends I don’t get to see often. But I felt so good once it was all done!
So I just dealt with this exact issue. I have around the same number of images as well. My 8yr! old MacBook Pro died last weekend (gone gone gone) and we went to the Apple store to see what they could do. Nothing, the machine was just gone. Thank sweet mother Mary the hard drive was still intact, which they ripped out for me. We came home to hook the external hard drive up and (whomp whomp) the last backup wasn’t complete. No worries, I still had the hard drive to pull all of it over. But that is the point: MULTIPLE back ups. I pulled over from the old hard drive, backed up to the external, and can still use the old hard drive as a back up as well. So please please please schedule “photo delete” into your schedule (just an hour at a time, set an alarm) and bust it out, it is worth it. And remember to delete the deleted photos bin in iPhoto, or they are actually still there. One other note: we share photos with family through SnapFish (online) and I consider that my last-resort backup. It would be a monstrous pain to have to pull from Snap to get my photos back, but I know the really important ones are there at least.
DO IT LADY!! As I well know, that Mac won’t last forever!!