It's no secret that I take a lot of photos. Our girls are just so little and they are growing up so quickly, I have to capture every moment. Ryan has always been our picture organizer, and I thought it would be helpful if he shared our 3-2-1 system for safely organizing digital photos. Take it away Ryan!
Hi everyone, Ryan here to share with you a little bit about how we safely store all our photos. Chelsee takes a lot of great pictures, but I’ll let you in on a little secret, there are a lot of photos you don’t see because they didn’t make the cut. Either someone was blurry, the focus was off, someone’s not looking at the camera, feet are cut off, etc. This shouldn’t be a surprise since most of her photos are of our children, who never sit still.
For example, here’s a shot that Chelsee has posted before:
And here are all the same shot that didn’t make the cut:
A lot of our photoshoots never even get posted. Sometimes they just ended up not being needed or they were “just for funsies.” So we end up with lots of photos. Like a LOT! We took around 50k photos in 2018! You may think that we just delete all the photos we don’t need, but you’d be wrong. Chelsee has been known to ask me for some random photo from months or years ago so she can add it to a new piece of wall art, a calendar, a Christmas card, or maybe she just wants to update the photos in an old blog post because, why not?
I’m not sure how it happened exactly, but the responsibility for storing the old photos has fallen on me. Initially we just kept these on an external hard drive that floated around the house. This was never a great solution, since the kids like to run off and hide things, like a 64gb SD Card that I don’t think I ever got the pictures off of… have you found that yet Chelsee? A single external hard drive also meant we were always a drive failure away from losing everything. And even if you don’t take as many photos as us, you probably don’t want to risk losing all your pictures.
So something had to change both in how we store the photos. With this in mind, I’ve tried to practice a good 3-2-1 strategy for backing up the photos. If you’re not familiar, this refers to having 3 copies of everything, 2 local and 1 off site. For our primary local storage, we have a Network Attached Storage, or NAS, that allows us to access all of our photos from any of our computers, phones, or tablets.
I backup all of the photos and other important files to an external hard drive that is kept in the house. And finally, all of our photos are backed up to Amazon Cloud Services Glacier Storage for our off-site storage. I went with Amazon Glacier because it is really cheap as long as you don’t need regular access. Since I hope I never need to retrieve them, I wanted to pay as little as possible. If you’re ok with some compression of your photos, then Google Photos could be a great option for you as well.
Once you’ve decided where to store the pictures, you still need some organization of how they are stored. Early on I just stored my pictures in a folder called Pictures and then each time I took a set of pictures I made a new sub-folder for whatever I happened to be doing such as Hot Air Ballooning 2007 or Snowboarding Alyeska 2006. This worked mostly fine in the early days. But as Chelsee started The House of Hood Blog, the number of pictures went up drastically and I was usually left to sort the pictures without input from her since someone has to watch the kids. So after several folders like McKinlee Pink Wall August 2008 - 1 and McKinlee Pink Wall August 2008 - 23. I realized I needed a better system.
Our current file structure is still a main folder now called Photos. Inside of these is now a folder for each year and inside of each year is a folder for each month. This is where the majority of our photos go, simply sorted by year and month. If there is clearly a theme to some of the pictures I will add an additional subfolder such as Disneyland so we can quickly find the pictures from that particular trip to Disneyland.
Ideally, I’d have the time to go through all the photos and tag them for who is in them and a general location. With 50,000 photos annually, that is a big undertaking that I haven’t felt like going into just yet. This is where something like Google Photos can come in handy. If you also sync your main folder with Google Photos, then you will have an online copy and this online copy is very easy to find with a handy website and mobile apps for iOS and Android. What’s really nice is I can search for things like Dog to find all of the pictures of Dexter.
The downside to Google Photos, at least for us, is that it limits the image size. Since most of our photos are shot from our Sony A7iii in RAW format, our photos can get a little large. If Chelsee decides she wants to update a blog post, she usually wants the original photos.
To store these online, I use Amazon’s Glacier storage. Once I have a good sized batch of photos ready, I zip them up using the built in tools to compress them (both Mac OS and Windows 10 have this). Then upload the zip to Amazon’s storage. Glacier is great for a backup solution. But, you do get charged for how much you are storing and how much you access it. Probably not something you want to actively use. But a nice just in case backup option since this is about the cheapest you’ll find cloud storage.
If there’s interest, I may do a how to tutorial on implementing a similar solution. Best of luck in getting organized, both physically and digitally in the new year!
Thank you Ryan for sharing how we store our photos! I need to do a better job at not setting my shot speed at high but the girls just move so quickly! I also really need to do a better job at deleting photos of things I know aren't worth saving! The main thing I recommend is starting to organize early (especially if you have kids!). We've taken SO many photos since having kids, I wish we would have been super diligent about it from the start.
On another note, we went to Cannon Beach this last weekend. I took close to 400 photos and I loved SO many, but who needs 400 photos of the same thing?!? One of my goals this year is to snap less photos. Yep, you heard that right. My camera settings have improved a lot. I really shouldn't need to take 100 photos of the same shot. How do you organize your photos? I'd love to hear!
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