Digital photo storage

Digital photo storage is one of the growing issues for scrapbookers and indeed anyone who takes a lot of digital photos. And it's literally growing! One of the great aspects of digital photography is the ability to take more photos without worrying about the cost of developing and printing, but generally people are reluctant to press that 'delete' button. The end result is an ever larger number of photos to manage and store.

Mind you we are better off in the digital photo storage world than in the old days of negatives and hard photos. Do you remember trying to store negatives and locate them for reprints? Or trying to remember which album that specific photo was in? Or indeed which shoebox (more likely)!

So what choices do we have for digital photo storage now. Well the first place you probably copy material to is the hard drive of your PC so that you can clear space on your camera. My first suggestion is that culling during the load process is definitely the way to go - it's much harder later on. But PC drives unfortuantely do fail and whilst recovery is usually possible, you don't want to risk the loss of your memories.

The next level is to duplicate hard drive contents on an external drive such as a Maxtor unit. At least the possibility of both the external and internal drives failing is very small. However where will you locate the external hard drive? Next to the PC? What happens if a thief or a fire takes out both units? You could arrange for your external drive to be off site (maybe swap with a friend?) but this can get unwieldy.

The next level is to use an on-line service for storage and this is likely to be a growing area. There are already plenty of sharing services such as Flickr but they are not really built for long term storage and retrieval.

One potentail solution is a service like Photomax which guarantees never to lose any of your photos and has a state of the art storage facility in the US.

If you are interested in increasing your storage security have a look at this digital photo storage service and sleep better at night!