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Guest Blog post by Karen Lieu – HR Manager by day and Anna Feccia Photography Studio Manager by night

Hi Everyone! I’m really excited to write this week’s blog post about digital photo storage. Most of you know that I can be a bit long winded so I apologize in advance for the length of this post but I think you will find it valuable. I am an avid scrapbooker and also sell Creative Memories products in my spare time (whatever that is!) Haha. As you can imagine with scrapbooking I take an insane amount of photos of just about anything and everything. And what exactly do I do with all those photos…read on.

Last month we took a family trip to Disneyland and I didn’t have time to clear the memory cards from my camera before we left. I brought the cards and my laptop with me to do it in the hotel before we entered the park so I’d have plenty of space to shoot our favorite sights at the Happiest Place on Earth. I plugged in my camera and downloaded over 1200 photos dating back to DECEMBER 2011!! Eeks. These days, most of the photos we take live on our hard drives forever or worse…on our cameras! And technology has advanced so much that the size of memory cards allows you to store hundreds of photos without ever having the need to download them to the computer. When I told Anna that I did this, she nearly had a heart attack. She couldn’t believe that I had traveled on an airplane to go on vacation with 5+ months of my family photos stored only on my camera’s memory cards. What would have happened if I lost my camera during my vacation before I loaded the photos? And what if I didn’t have a backup of those photos at home or offsite. Or what if my only backup was on a DVD at home and my house caught on fire? Ok, ok, that’s probably not going to happen…but what if it did? YEARS of photos and family memories would simply be gone. With that, I promised Anna that I would not only do a better job of downloading my cards frequently but I’d also create a secondary backup copy of my images, just in case. Since then, I’ve been doing research on the best way to handle this. And now, you all get to benefit from what I’ve learned.

If you are a Mac person, like me, the answer for photo storage is easy. Apple has a product called Time Machine. It is a free software that comes with most of their computers and it is very simple. Plug in an external hard drive and let the software do the rest. If you are a PC user…well, I’m sorry. Ok, just kidding…but really, you should think about buying a Mac. We love them and I’m not just saying that because my husband works there.

There are a couple alternate options if you don’t have access to the Time Machine software:
A. An inexpensive, quick and easy solution is to buy a zillion blank DVDs and start copying your photos and videos. Be sure to make TWO copies of everything: one to keep at your home and the other to keep at an alternate location (work office, family member’s house, etc). The biggest concern with DVDs is that they can fail AND in the event of disaster (fire, earthquake, tornado – not that we really have those in CA but you get the point), you would have an additional copy offsite. If you go this route, make sure to backup frequently and check the DVDs yearly to make sure they’re still working.
B. Invest in a high quality external hard drive and manually copy your files to this drive for safekeeping. This is generally much easier than keeping track of zillions of DVDs BUT external hard drives are just as susceptible to failure. The good news is that most of the external hard drives come equipped with software to automate the backup process.
C. Use an online option backup website such as Backblaze or Carbonite. These sites will automatically upload your entire hard drive to their servers. The major plus of this method is that their servers are in a secure location usually quite a distance away from you and your original files are. The bad part is that getting setup on these sites can take several weeks. AND then there is the concern of privacy…who wants your family’s most personal and private photographed moments being shared with some third-party vendor.
D. Utilize a Cloud Storage website such as JustCloud or MediaFire. There are also websites that allow you to upload full resolution photos and video such as Flickr and Smugmug.

So now what? I’ve created a quick and easy to-do list below to get your digital photo storage process underway!
1. Locate your camera and look at how many photos you have on your memory card. Think about how important these images are to you and your family and ask yourself how you’d feel if they were gone forever. Take a deep breath and make a commitment to backup your photos!
2. Schedule time to download images to your computer and setup a recurring date/time to do this each month or several times a month. You should also have more than one memory card so you can rotate frequently. And just so you know, memory cards fail more than hard drives so get in the habit of downloading after everytime you use your camera or at the very least after big events.
3. Decide on a method for backing up your files and do so often.
4. Set a date annually to check your backup copy and make sure it’s still working
5. Sit back and relax knowing that your images will be truly last forever!