The 21st Century Dilemma: what do you do with all those photos?

A Facebook friend recently posted that her hard drive had crashed, taking with it all her backed up photos. She was in a panic, because the defective drive contained precious photos of her two girls! This is a very 21st century dilemma. The photos we take today, whether with a phone or a "real camera" are likely to be digital. Those digital photos can be seen right away but they don't really exist unless you print them. Everyone takes way too many photos to print them all, so it's a matter of backing up those digital files and keeping them safe. So, where do you store all those photos? First, a little history.

The name of my business is Joanna's Digital Images because, when I started out, in 2001, I wanted to differentiate myself from the majority of photographers at that time who were still using film. I suppose you could say I was an "early adopter" but, in fact, I was just a control freak who hated giving my pictures to a drug store to ruin in processing! The pictures that pushed me over the edge were the ones of a Mass in St Peter's Square with Pope John Paul that the local drug store "mislaid". They were not wonderful pictures, taken with an Advantix film camera and I did eventually get them back, but it made me look at Digital seriously for the first time. I invested about $450 in a 3.1 Megapixel Kodak DC4800, a wonderful little camera!  If 3MP doesn't sound like much, remember that early consumer cameras were mostly VGA resolution (640x480 pixels, meant to be viewed online) and "serious" digital cameras cost thousands of dollars in 2001!  I lost a few of those early pictures through Operator Error, since I was not very adept with computers at the time.  I soon found out that I had to download my images to the computer and save them, if I wanted to keep them. 

Therein lies the beginning of the 21st Century dilemma. It is both a blessing and a curse that you can take thousands of pictures with your digital camera. Storage soon becomes an issue.  Many of the pictures you take will not be heirlooms but there will be countless gems that you want to hold on to. 

So what should you do to make sure your digital photos are safe?  Of course, printing your pictures will allow you to enjoy them, but what happens if your print is lost? The digital file is the negative which allows you to print another copy. I suggest backing up your photos in multiple locations. External hard drives get cheaper every day- why not have more than one? Remote storage in a cloud account is the option that covers the most bases; even if a hurricane takes your house, you can get your pictures back! There are numerous companies that provide cloud storage, mostly for a monthly fee, but the only one I know of that guarantees your pictures will be safe is Forever®. They pride themselves on doing things a little differently. Instead of a monthly fee, you pay once and own your storage. You control your images, with no data-mining or threats of deletion. They guarantee that, as standards change, they will migrate your images to the new format. I like them enough to promote them to my clients as well as using them myself! 

Digital photography continues to fascinate me. In one way, it is a means to an end: recording memories for my clients-and for my family. I will always be a photographer, as long as I can hold a camera. Computers are a part of modern photography, for better or worse, and technology changes fast.  It's up to us to make sure that the next generations can enjoy the pictures we take today!