Photo storage advice please

[Ess001]

Hi - I've just changed my laptop to a MacBook, and have heaps of photos, all neatly filed in folders on the laptop that I need to transfer. I thought Cloud storage might be the easiest solution. How and where have you clever cruisers all got your photo's stored? I'd like a storage solution where I can ideally drop and drag my folders from my laptop! Something simple!!!!

Thanks

Ess

[david63]

Are talking about "storage" or "backup" or both?

You need to have at lease two, preferably three copies of your photos all in different places.

If you have a laptop then a portable drive is worth considering as you can then plug it in to any other device. Cloud storage is fine as a backup whilst it is there - but be aware that it could disappear overnight. Dropbox is quite handy as it will keep them synchronised but if you have a lot of photos it can get expensive if you run out of free space.

Hard drive on your laptop could fail at some point.

I have a copy of mine on my desktop, laptop, webspace, portable drive and Dropbox

Life was far easier when you printed them off and stuck them in an album.

[Manoverboard]

Mine are stored on two PCs and also backed up on CD / DVDs.

Beware of external drives, I have just purchased one only to discover that ' some ' of the functions on Windows 10 do not recognise the device, the same may / may not apply to a Mac.

[Raybosailor]

The online photo processing company's like Truprint have free online storage and you can upload your photos into albums too. The beauty about these sites is that you can have your favourite snaps made into photos,place mats,mugs and calender's quite cheaply and you can send a link to friends and family to view an album or single photo to view or purchase.

I have had photos on these sites for years with no problem but as others have said use a flash drive or similar as a back up.

[david63]

The online photo processing company's like Truprint have free online storage

But be aware that they can shut that down at a moments notice and if that is your only set of files you can end up loosing them all!

[Raybosailor]

The online photo processing company's like Truprint have free online storage

But be aware that they can shut that down at a moments notice and if that is your only set of files you can end up loosing them all!

As I said in my post David my photos have been on those sites for years but they are on flash drives anyway.

I have done the photography for one or two weddings for young ones on a budget and then set up an account in their name and they and their guests could purchase the photos they wanted. Up to date there must be about 2000 odd wedding photos on there.
But back up at all times.

[qbman1]

A bit archaic now, I know, but I'm like Moby and back mine up on DVDs and CDs

[david63]

A service that I have just found which you may not, or you may already, be aware of is Tesco Photo.

This uses an app either on an iPad/iPhone or Andriod smartphone and allows you to upload photos to Tesco Photo and order prints which you can collect from your local Tesco store an hour later.

[Silver_Shiney]

Just had one helluva fright.

I thought I'd copy my photos to OneDrive and selected everything in the Pictures folders, dragged it over to the OneDrive entry in File Explorer and, to my horror, it said it was moving them to OneDrive, with no option to cancel. Oh well, I can always copy them back, I thought. No, it would not let me open OneDrive, there was no app associated with it.... Thank goodness for Ctrl-Z. Those were my only copies (although I am in the process of backing up to an external HD)

[GillD46]

A service that I have just found which you may not, or you may already, be aware of is Tesco Photo.

This uses an app either on an iPad/iPhone or Andriod smartphone and allows you to upload photos to Tesco Photo and order prints which you can collect from your local Tesco store an hour later.

Thanks for that tip, David, I have just ordered a canvas of our granddaughter, which will be ready next week.

[Raybosailor]

A service that I have just found which you may not, or you may already, be aware of is Tesco Photo.

This uses an app either on an iPad/iPhone or Andriod smartphone and allows you to upload photos to Tesco Photo and order prints which you can collect from your local Tesco store an hour later.

Thanks for that tip, David, I have just ordered a canvas of our granddaughter, which will be ready next week.

As I recommended in an earlier post these online photo labs are a very reliable and free way to store your images, Tesco,Truprint,Snapfish and others are all good and if you do require prints on a regular basis it is a good idea to pre-purchase a block amount to get cheaper prints.

[Kendhni]

My preference is cloud storage and I have at least two cloud providers linking to each of my photo directories. I like Google because you can get unlimited storage for free, and I also use Box (because we got a load of storage free with our tablets) or if all you want is just some general storage then there are a couple of Chinese based sites(*) that will give you as much storage as you want (one is currently giving up to 10Tb).


(*) Some people may howl in fear at the thought of a Chinese site but there are good and bad ... for basic storage of low risk data they can be as good as anywhere else (taking into account that Google, Microsoft, Apple and others have already admitted to doing data crawls and having to give details out to various 'agencies'). If you prefer something more European then have a look at 'Hubic' which is based in France (but technically less secure than some others).

[Raybosailor]

WORD OF WARNING

Microsoft Onedrive has changed the terms of their online storage limits, the 15 GB storage has been reduced to 5 GB and the 15 GB camera roll bonus is discontinued.

Tesco Photo online storage has conditions, you must make one purchase over a period of 365 days and any period of inactivity for 90 days or more will result in the account being withdrawn.