Protect your photos online

 

 

Do you know where all your digital photos are

Do you know how to protect your photos

 

 

Most people say that the most important thing they would save if their house was burning down would be their family photos. But what about the less dramatic incidents in life when you hard drive crashes or your phone is stollen.

If your computer is six or more years old then you have a 50% chance of its hard drive crashing. Hard drives will fail after time, this is guaranteed. It is also very easy to loose files and unknowingly delete them.

Police estimate 300,000 mobile phones were stolen in 2013. Thats 35 phones stolen every hour. A laptop or tablet is stolen every minute. Or 1 in six of use will loose our device.

If you have made a copy of your photos on CD then think again. CDs only have a shelf life of around 10 years and can easily get damaged.

Many people post photos to facebook and other social media services. There is no guarantee these companies will keep your photos safe. And what if Facebook closed down over night, would be able to retrieve your photos ? You get what you pay for in life.

With so many places to hide your photos, just finding them again can be a major task. Have you ever tried to find a photo from your holiday 5 years ago and could not remember where it is on your hard drive. One tip I have is rename you files as you save them with a unique identifier.

I recently decided to backup the phones of my iPhone and what I found was of some surprise.  I have had the same phone for 2 years now and discovered I had 3Gb of images to protect.  But there way problem.  How do you get your photos off you iPhone in one go.  Sure it is easy to share photo, email them etc one at a time but how do you capture everything in one go.  The tool I used was Adobe Lightroom to import everything and then exported the photos to my hard drive for sorting.

The system I use is create a folder for the year and in that folder create folders for each event and name them with the date and place or person in the photos. This way you can search you hard drive and find your photos.

To protect your photos I suggest using an online photo gallery system. There are many to choose from and the one I recommend is SmugMug which has unlimited storage and your can subscribe for 12 months from as little as £25. An online gallery will guarantee your photos are backed up and you can still share your photos with friend via Facebook is you wish.

Backup your photos, you are not immune and don’t wait until its too late.