Digital photography makes it easy for anyone to capture life’s special moments. But that convenience comes with a price. As easy as it now is to capture a great image, it is just as easy to lose that image forever at a swipe or click. How do you protect your precious digital images and scans? Read on for some digital photo backup do’s and don’ts.
Here are the “Do’s”
Do use cloud services. Google Photos offers unlimited storage for images up to 16 megapixels and videos up to a resolution of 1080p. Amazon Photos offers unlimited online photo storage to Prime members, plus up to 5 GB of video storage. Amazon also offers two additional upgrades/standalone plans. Apple’s iCloud comes on every Apple device, starting with 5 GB of free storage. There are also many other paid options as well, such as DropBox, SmugMug, and IDrive.
Do use hard drives and other hardware. Hard drives, flash drives, and even DVDs or BluRay discs are a great way to store your memories. Pro tip: have more than one physical backup and store them in different locations just in case disaster strikes!
Do stay organized! Label folders in a way that makes sense to you – by people, events, or dates. Add metadata to photos to “label” them with information that future generations may need to know – names, dates, etc.
Do test your backups regularly. If one of your backups fails, you will want to make a copy (of the original or from a secondary backup) as soon as possible.
Now, A Couple of “Don’ts”
Don’t depend on social media sites! These sites can compress the file size and remove valuable metadata from your images. While they are fun for sharing, they are not ideal for backing up your most treasured photos.
Don’t depend on only one backup method. Cloud storage sites may go down, hard drives may fail. Make sure you don’t have all of your memories stored in just one place.
So there you have it: our top tips for backing up your digital images. Don’t forget that your old hard copies of photos can be backed up digitally as well – you just need to scan them first! Not up to the task? Let us help! Our photo scanning services start at $19.95. Click here to find out more.
