How to Safely Store Your Photography

Funnily enough, I just posted on hard-drives for travellers.

We take a three-pronged approach to our photo backups.
1) Best shots go to flickr.
2) Secondary hard-drive goes in another bag.
3) DVD backups get send to my mum whenever I have another 4 gigs of photos (every 2 months on average).

I once lost the photos from a two-week trip to Fiji due to a Windows virus; I’ve since switched to Mac and am paranoid about backups!

flickr != flick’r

and

iPhoto is not on online photo sharing site.

what about Google’s Picasa, certainly one of the best:

http://picasa.google.com/

plus so many more:

http://reviews.cnet.com/4520-6451_7-6245099-1.html

Thanks for the tips Very useful! Recently I’ve been pondering how I should store my photographs, so I’m glad I found this blog post.

Craig – Thanks for the advice

Tyler – Can’t believe I forgot Picasa. Great tip! And thanks for the link. Lots of great photo sharing sites out there.

Erica – Glad you found the post useful.

What we preach at my company, Photo Field Imaging (www.photofieldimaging.com) is backups. Even for my own photography, I keep 3 copies of all data, including 2 external drives. This has always worked for myself and the clients that I server.

[...] lose your camera or a card. This allows you to accrue the least amount of image loss. Make sure you store your photography safely once your travels are [...]

I found this site called http://www.briteroots.com to scan my photos. They are relatively new, but affordable. Only 10 cents per photo. I got a DVD with my images and they archive all my high resolution photos online for free. I had some prints bought and sent to me from the site. Just a thought.

I’ve met a couple of people who have lost data from a WD passport. I put my vote in for the Buffalo brand, I got 500Gb shock resistant one in Singapore for SG$200 (about US$130 but left it on a train :/ Good thing I have photos backed up on laptop still. I got another buffalo (although non shock resistant) 500Gb in Thailand for US$100 and have not had any problems with it since

Great article Lola!

These days cloud Drives are increasingly popular. Google offer them at a range of sizes, right up to a ridiculously whopping 16TB: http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/11/11/google-offers-a-16-terabyte-cloud-drive-for-4096-a-year/

I was also surprised to see Picasa missing from the list Having used a few different sites, I finally settled on Picasa. Partly because I already use Google for so many other things, and partly because it is so damn easy to use. Especially if you install the client.

They recently posted up their pricing for additional storage too.
20 GB – $5/yr
80 GB – $20/yr
200 GB – $50/yr
400 GB – $100/yr
1 TB – $256/yr
and so on.

WD has a 1 TB Passport drive now. Crazy!!

http://www.pcworld.idg.com.au/review/security/western-digital/my_passport_essential_se_1tb/323018

Great post, however I think a real problem while being on ‘the road’ is the ease at which you can upload photos to sites like Picassa, Flickr and the like.

As @Carlo has just pointed about, flash cards are becoming so cheap these days that its worth picking up a couple and then rent paying a processing shop to put them on CD for friends and family (perhaps even post them back while travelling).

Aside from that, I have to agree about Flickr. It’s a great site, and I’m looking forward to picking up one of the new Sony cameras which automatically plots the geo coordinates to the photo file.

Have you guys done any features on Geo-based cameras?

All the best,

Si