Photos! Photos! Photos! How Do You Back Them Up? Do You Keep Photo Albums?

I am in my 50s and we must have 30 photo albums in our basement. If I could ever get around to digitizing them i would throw them out in a heartbeat. Someday someone is going to have to clean out our house and deal with them all.

I'm in the process of digitizing all the old photos in our family albums...many have already begun to deteriorate. I store them on the hard drive on my laptop, and back them up to a flash drive I keep in a safe. I keep the original photos, but I'm sure they'll get pitched after I'm gone, because the line ends with me.

It's kind of weird to think that many of us when we die may leave behind thousands of digital images that within two generations will mean very little to anyone.

It's hard to even find time to look through all the pictures. "In the old days" you might have 10 photos developed of a family party but with digitial technology you have dozens!

Don't have any. Never took pictures. Why waste money on that when I could be spending it on books and records?

I back mine up to a portable hard drive but also just this past week uploaded 27,000+ pictures to a cloud service. It took almost 24 hours to upload them.

R5 = Woody Allen

[quote]It's kind of weird to think that many of us when we die may leave behind thousands of digital images that within two generations will mean very little to anyone.

I've looked through my grandparents' photo albums, and I have no idea who many of my grandparents' extended family members are, such as cousins. I never knew them.

[quote]I'm in the process of digitizing all the old photos in our family albums...many have already begun to deteriorate. I store them on the hard drive on my laptop, and back them up to a flash drive I keep in a safe. I keep the original photos, but I'm sure they'll get pitched after I'm gone, because the line ends with me.

This is pretty much what I'm doing too. However, I've not placed the flash drives in a safe. If my place burns down, the original prints, the digital back-ups, and the back-up of that all goes up in toxic smoke.

I just uploaded all mine to a cloud service too . At least if the house burns down they're "up there". Another solution is to give a friend or family member a USB or hard drive to keep.

I'm creating an archive. Digitizing some, backing up all into a hard drive with backup. Plus gdrive for easy access. Creating metadata. I'll be done in mid 2023.

Printed photos will go to a library.

[quote] Printed photos will go to a library.

Why would a library want your photos?

Any recommendations on a cloud service?

I keep copies on my computer, on another hard drive, and on a cloud service. I scan old photos and keep copies both on the computer and another drive. I always save the originals.

A number of months ago my older computer suffered a hard drive failure. At least the computer gave me a message before the crash, and I saved everything that I could. A few things were lost that that I really regretted, but miraculously, Best Buy sent the hard drive to some place that works with crashed drives, and every single thing on the drive was saved.