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The Kitchen Table

Savings photos and videos

6 years ago

I have thousands of pics, videos and documents on my laptop. Also my cell phone. I can't seem to find the computer forum so thought I would ask here. Best, easiest, safest way to save all my photos, etc. from my laptop and my cell phone. Stress on easiest, because I really am a total amateur.

thanks!

Featured Answer

ophoenix

6 years ago

The easiest and fastest way to handle tons of photos is to purchase a large portable hard drive. One terabyte should do the job - depending on how many photos there are and the resolution they were shot at. I have two smaller portable drives full of images but retrieving a particular image is pretty timely. If some were shot in RAW then they will be huge files. I personally stopped shooting in RAW because each image would start out at 40 - 60 MGs or so. I am a professional photographer and unless the image is going to be printed in a book or made into a wall sized photo, a good quality JPG is satisfactory for my uses. I have never had a problem with the JPG files being acceptable with any of the many photos that have been published in books or used for lectures or websites. Sorting photos is a very tedious job. Many of my old photos are on DVD's. I use a Sharpie to put the names of the files with a date and short description and have them in DVD binders. Really fast to flip through the binder to find what I am looking for. I have more than 10,000 digital images over 12 years or so. Some day I will delete the duplicates, out of focus and just bad shots! lol But not tomorrow. lol

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Comments (6)

carolb_w_fl_coastal_9/10
6 years ago
last modified: 6 years ago
Can you put them on a flash USB drive? The ones will lots of gigabytes have become rather inexpensive.

I transfer photos from my phone to my desktop using Bluetooth, or email them to myself.

There's always the cloud, depending on whether you're on Google or Apple. I tend to trust Google's cloud more than Apple's, since I've seen/heard some horror stories of people with iOS losing all their stuff in the cloud after updates or device upgrades. I put stuff on Google Drive that I want to be able to access from more than one device.

I don't have this problem because my desktop computer has 500 Gigs of space, so hopefully, someone with more experience will step in...
katlan thanked carolb_w_fl_coastal_9/10
maifleur03
6 years ago
As I have found out technology changes and not all devices will work with future devices. I started out with the large floppy's only to find that when that machine died there were none that would read a floppy. Same thing happened with the small disks. I would go for the cloud because of that. But also having to take care of my husband's thousands of pictures the thought has came to me of who would be interested in the pictures I take and would they be able to locate them on any device I have. Things I think they might want I send to them now and keep the rest for my own enjoyment. Probably half of which I have deleted because of various reasons.
katlan thanked maifleur03
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woodrose77
6 years ago
The cloud is probably the safest option. I would also put a copy on a large flash drive, or external hard drive. I like the portability of a flash drive,
katlan thanked woodrose77
Richard (Vero Beach, Florida)
6 years ago

I use duplication. Everything, whether from phone, laptop or secondary (slave/bedroom) computer gets copied onto my main/master (living room) computer.

Data on the master computer is copied to the slave computer. (not manually, I use a sync tool but manually would be simplest to start)

Sometimes I'll also copy really important data that is no longer changing to a USB external storage device.

Also, I use the terabyte of cloud storage that comes with Microsoft 365 for offsite "just in case the house burns down" storage.

I wouldn't save anything you want to keep in just one place though. Storage devices fail.
User
6 years ago
Good info. Right now I trust my techie DH to keep me safe with regard to storage. I'm going to start another thread with a related but different question: now that we have all these electronic pictures etc, how do you find/organize them? ???
katlan thanked User

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