Where to put photos has always been an issue, but we’ve recently made it far more complicated. There was a time when you would just stick your paper photos (remember those?) in a photo album (remember those?), and stick the negatives (remember those) in dad’s old cigar boxes (remember those?) and that was that…
…then came digital, and stock in hard drive manufacturers went through the roof. Everyone was buying HDDs like they were going out of style, and filing away all your DCIM directories from your Sony, Fuju and LG cameras…
…then came smartphones, tablet cameras, iPods-with-cameras, sports cameras, underwear cameras (although that was probably just me), and on and on…. organization was now a bigger issue than ever: did you download these photos from your phone or tablet? Is it a duplicate? Should I just ignore the problem and hope that nothing really bad happens?
Of course something bad will happen. Something bad always happens when it comes to tech.
OK, let’s look at three potential solution paths: HDD’s kept at home, cloud based storage and retrieval solutions, or - preferably - a mixture of both.
HDDs on a House Server or Computer
This is the easiest for most people to understand, since its the digital equivalent of squirreling away negatives in a cigar box. The steps are pretty straightforward as well:
- Buy yourself two (yes, two) large external harddrives. They should be large enough to store not only your pictures, but your potential for pictures - and possibly video - for years to come. Why two? So you can back up your pictures automagically.
- Figure out where these drives are going to hang off of. If you only have one computer, then its a pretty simple problem. If you have a home server (or even a computer networked in your home that is always on), that’s the best option.
- Set up a directory structure on just one of the hard drives where you wish to place your photos. (Don’t worry about the second, clone drive - we’ll take care of that in step #4.) On my home drive, my top level directory is called “Photo” and all of the directories below it are organized by year:
…photo/album2009
…photo/album2010
…photo/album2011
etc.
In each of these directories, I organize how I wish with subdirectory names like “HawaiiTrip,” “Italy,” etc. These are the directories that the pictures will live. - Next, you want a backup application that you can have complete control over so that you don’t have to worry about the problem of backing up one hard drive to the other…it will just “happen.”
For a windows PC or house server, my recommendation is Fileback PC. FPC will allow you to, very easily, have one directory (or an entire drive) on one hard drive copy changes made to the that directory over to a separate drive automatically. This means, if you put a photo in a directory on that drive, you don’t have to worry about backing it up. Fileback PC will automatically copy it to the new drive.
For an Apple machine, I would stay away from TimeMachine - the builtin Mac backup app in OSX. It has its share of problems, is pretty single-minded about its task, and isn’t terribly configurable. My recommendation here is an application call ChronoSync. It’s probably the Appleverse’s closest analog to Fileback PC on Windows. You can, very simply, perform the same stunt that FPC does for Windows: you can point ChronoSync at a source directory and have it copy the contents to another directory on another drive. - OK, now you have somewhere to put your images, now HOW do you do it?
Dealing just with phones and tablets for a minute, if you have an iOS (Apple) device, the problem just became easier with iOS 5. Prior to iOS 5, your only real option was to plug your phone or tablet in with a cable and sync your pictures over with iTunes. With iOS 5, you no longer need a cable, but you still need iTunes. iOS 5 (both on the phone and the tablet) allows you to sync your on-device photos with either a Mac or PC running iTunes.
There’s a good article at the Apple support site on how to do this here: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4083
Once they are in iTunes, you can drag and drop the photos to the directory structure that you’ve set up for yourself above.
On Android phones and tablets, this can be done a number of ways, but the easiest way I found is by using the DoubleTwist application. DoubleTwist acts very much like iTunes on iOS. There’s a client app that runs on the phone or the tablet, and a server application that runs on your PC or Mac. Just like in iOS, you can tell DoubleTwist to sync a photo directory from your Android device to DoubleTwist in your house.
Once the photos are in DoubleTwist, you can drag and drop the photos to the directory structure you’ve set up for yourself above.
Cloud Based Photo Storage
“Cloud” is the new buzz word meaning “server with hard drive sitting out there on the Internets.” It’s an old concept that’s been jazzed up by new applications on smartphones, tablets and laptops that allow for easy placement and retrieval of photos.
We’ll walk through a few of these systems (the ones I use, to be honest) and talk about their pros and cons.
Google+ on Android
If you have an Android device, phone or tablet, you’re basically done. With the release of Google+ for Android (Google’s social networking service), you can easily set up your device to upload photos to the cloud immediately after snapping the photo. Your pictures wind up on picasaweb.google.com (also visible at plus.google.com) in a private directory called “instant uploads.” The photos are stored in full resolution at no cost to you. (Google also has deals with several photo printing companies in case you want to have your masterpieces framed.)
It’s really hard to overstate the convenience of this - you’ll never, ever lose a picture again.
Cost: $0
iCloud on iOS
Like Android’s Google+, if you have an iOS 5 device, you’re basically done. iCloud for iOS allows you to automagically upload images taken with your phone or tablet directly to the cloud the moment you snap the picture.
Although there is no web-based interface a la Google+, Apple has done an excellent job in incorporating iCloud into many of their applications on OS X as well as iOS. If you want to find your photos on a Mac, just turn on iPhoto and look for the “Photo Stream” tab. Clicking on it will reveal all your pictures.
Like Google+, these photos are private, so only you can view them.
Currently, you cannot retrieve iCloud photos on a Windows PC - but I can’t believe that is a permanent condition.
Cost: Under 5Gigs, $0 over that is a per Gig charge.
Dropbox for Android and iOS
The nearly ubiquitous DropBox service is a cloud based storage-and-sharing solution that allows you to place whatever you need in an cloud-based directory stucture. You can retrieve what you placed in the dropbox on nearly any machine in the world.
DropBox exists on both Android and iOS devices, of course - but even more interesting, a number of device applications (PICPLZ, Instagram, Pixelpipe, etc) will allow you to have images you have taken on your phone copied to DropBox - just like Google Plus does.
There is a cost for this, of course. Since storage is DropBox’s only business model, there is an ongoing charge. (DropBox offers a free service, but for only 5Gigs of storage.Too little in most cases.)
Cost: $10/month for 50Gigs, $20/month for 100Gigs
Also available on Android and iOS, Flickr (now a Yahoo property) is a storage solution specifically for photos, unlike dropbox. With Flickr, your images are stored in full resolution for easy retrieval at another time. Applications exist for both Android and iOS devices for you to push your pictures up to Flickr. With the exception of PixelPipe on Android, however, I’m not aware of an “instant upload” service on either Android or iOS that will allow you to have you newly taken pictures uploaded. You simply have to remember to do it.
Cost: $0
Amazon Cloud Drive for Android and iOS
The Amazon Cloud Drive is Amazon’s answer to the cloud storage problem. Music, photos and documents are neatly subdivided into different directories. Because Amazon envisions the service as most beneficial to music, there is no charge for storing music, but a yearly charge for pictures and documents. (Like DropBox and iCloud, Amazon gives you 5Gigs a year for free.)
While using Amazon Cloud Drive for music is ridiculously simple, uploading photos is a little bit of a pain. Uploading photos to Amazon Cloud Drive from a laptop is not too bad, just go to your amazon.com account, click “cloud drive” and use the upload tool. From devices, its still not as easy as it could be.
On Android devices, getting pictures to the cloud is the same as on the laptop: go to your account on amazon.com and use the uploader.
On iOS devices, it’s not there yet. You cannot do the same trick as you can on Android, since the amazon uploader is flash based. There are currently no apps on iOS that I am aware of that allows access to the photos section of Amazon Cloud Drive. (Although IIS has released apps that allow iOS users to access Amazon Cloud Drive music via an app, so a photo app must not be far behind.)
Cost: $0 for less than 5G, roughly $1/Gig/year for each Gig over the initial 5.
Home Plus Cloud Solutions
If two drives are better for backup, three drives is even better right? And if that third drive was in the cloud? Then you not only have complete protection, but the ability to access your photos from anywhere - even if you are not on your home network.
To do this requires a little work on your part, and a dedicated machine (Mac or PC) at your house to perform the syncing.
The first step is to set up your home HDD solution - you can follow the first section of this article to do that. The next steps are up to you:
Using DropBox as your “third drive”
Since you have already downloaded Fileback PC (on Windows) or ChronoSync (on Macs) to clone your original drive, copying everything again to the DropBox cloud drive is easy.
- Follow the setup above to create your HDD drive with clone, then..
- On Windows: Use Fileback PC to sync a second version of your picture directory to the default, cached Dropbox folder. This is typically in the directory C:/Users/(your username)/Dropbox
On Mac, exactly the same idea. Just get ChronoSync to sync a second copy of your picture directory to the default Dropbox directory. This is typically in the directory /Users/(your username)/Dropbox - Done.
Using Amazon Cloud Drive (or any other cloud based drive) as your “third drive”
Under Windows, this is fairly straightforward with the addition of one additional piece of software: the unfortunately named Gladinet. Gladinet mounts the Amazon Cloud Drive (or dozens of other cloud based drives) as drive “G” on your Windows computer. Once this is done, you can use Fileback PC to sync your photo directory to the “G” drive. Your pictures are now in the cloud.
Under Macs… honestly, I’m not sure. I’m not aware of an OS X application that easily allows an OS X user to mount an Amazon Cloud Drive as a network mounted share. If anyone out there knows of a way, I’d love to hear it. Please respond here or email me directly.
I hope these tips help you going forward to avoid the “omg I lost all my pictures” problem…
- January 2
- , 2012
