How many of us are in possession of family photo albums dating back to the early part of the last century? Since the late 1890s, when Kodak introduced the first truly portable camera, memories have been captured on film, printed on photographic paper and lovingly saved in albums. If you are like me, you inherited photo albums from parents and grandparents, and for years you created your own family albums. Today, most of the photographs we take never become prints, but instead are saved, and displayed, in digital format. How do we keep them safe?
Back in the days when we took photos with film camera, there were limits to how many pictures we could take. Most rolls of film held 12, 24, or 36 exposures. Film was expensive, and was bulky to carry around. When you saw something you wanted to photograph, you usually took one, maybe two shots. Today, with digital photos, there is little thought given whether to take two or ten shots of one scene, just to be sure you get it exactly right. The iPhone even has a built in burst mode; hold your finger on the camera button and the camera continues to shoot photos until you lift your finger. With the ability to take so many photos, it is imperative that you sort through your images on a regular basis, keeping only the best and deleting the rest. When you have decided on the keepers, they should be saved to a local backup drive for safe keeping. Once upon a time you would have used floppy disks for your backups. It would have worked but was labor intensive and required a large number of floppy disks. Today you can use a USB flash drive, also know as thumb drive. Flash drives have become very reasonably priced and an eight gigabyte drive can easily store up to 1,000 four megabyte images.
For added safety digital photos should be stored in more than one location and today cloud storage is the best option. Last week I wrote about Amazon’s Prime Photo service, which is included with an Amazon Prime subscription. Three other possible alternatives are Google Photos, Apple iCloud, and Flickr.
Google Photos (photos.google.com) is the free successor to the popular photo editing application Picasa, which will be phased out over the next few months. Google Photos offer unlimited cloud storage for both digital photographs and videos. The service offers sharing options, organizes photos by months or days, rudimentary editing, and a automated feature, Assistant, which includes face and location recognition. The service can be accessed exclusively online, or by downloading a desktop iOS or Android app. There is a 16 megapixel limit to the size of the images that can be stored, but this should not be a problem for most amateur photographers. Google Photos is accessible to anyone with a free, Google id.
If you use Apple devices, iCloud offers four levels of service. Everyone who has an Apple ID receives 5 GB of free storage, which can be used to backup all types of files, including photos. The limit increases to 50 GB for $0.99 a month, 200 GB for $2.99 a month, and 1 TB (terabyte) for $9.99 a month (One terabyte is 1,000 gigabytes, and the catalog of a serious photographer can easily exceed this amount of data). To make storing photos effortless, uses can choose to automatically upload every photo taken with an iPhone or iPad. While not for everyone, iCloud offers low cost and a seamless way to backup and store photos for users of iOS devices.
Another alternative is Flickr (www.flickr.com), the Yahoo service which offers 1 TB of free storage. For over ten years Flickr has been a premier photo storage, organizing and editing service for millions of users around the world. To access Flickr you need a free Yahoo ID, and it can be accessed exclusively online or with an iOS or Android app. Over the past decade, while several other cloud storage services closed up shop, Flickr has continued to evolve and keep pace with the times. Flickr also makes it extremely easy to share photos, both with private groups or with the community of Flickr users.
Once you decide to use a cloud solution for the backup and storage of your digital photos, you are now creating the modern version of a family photo album. Of course with the rate of change today, modern may only be relevant until the next advancement in 2017! If anyone has any other topics of interest that they would like to see addressed in OnMouseClick, please email me at onmouseclick@digitalquinn.com.
No comments:
Post a Comment