# How do you Store Digital Photos



## jsud2002 (Nov 7, 2015)

I have been having a clean out on my laptop and noticed I have over 15,000 digital photos all of which are stored in individual folders , These are labeled watches, mods, Lakes 2011 , York 2016 , Birthday , Christmas etc . I have now copied all 15,000 to an external HDD for safe keeping and have deleted them from lmy laptop I hope to one day sort through all the 15,000 as I am sure I do not need all of them . My question is how do members here store digital photos ? do you keep then on the laptop , external HDD , both , or are your photo's floating in a cloud somewhere .

Also is there any free software that I could download to create a photo album/book , not to print out but to keep on my laptop . For example we visited the Lake District in 2011 and I have photos that I would like to keep in a book so that when I am old I can flick through them with my wife .

Cheers John


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## ziggy1024 (Dec 18, 2017)

Definitely don't rely on a single HDD of any description! At least copy them back onto the laptop as well ASAP...


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## jsud2002 (Nov 7, 2015)

ziggy1024 said:


> Definitely don't rely on a single HDD of any description! At least copy them back onto the laptop as well ASAP...


 Good idea I shall copy them back over .


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## Roger the Dodger (Oct 5, 2009)

I have most stored on the PC like you, John, but they are all backed up on flash drives as well, one for each subject...bugs, flowers, watches etc. I hardly ever keep them on my handheld devices (tablet, phone) for long.


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## Boots (Sep 22, 2018)

They did use to say that if data is not on three storage devices it is not secure. One device should be stored in a separate location in case of fire. flood, etc.

I don't follow that slavishly, but every few months I do copy everything across to two external HDDs, one of which gets stashed with a friend.

It's the family pictures that matter, but it is easier to just copy everything.


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## jsud2002 (Nov 7, 2015)

Boots said:


> They did use to say that if data is not on three storage devices it is not secure. One device should be stored in a separate location in case of fire. flood, etc.


 I have a couple of those usb flash drives which I could also copy to this being the third storage solution. I never thought of fire or flood so giving one to one of my kids to keep in their house is a good idea.


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## Bow (Jan 23, 2021)

I have a OneDrive account which costs me a couple of quid a month for 100GB which works for me.


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## scottswatches (Sep 22, 2009)

any data that only exists on one place doesn't really exist. I use flickr to back up my photos, and an external hard drive for periodic back ups. That way if two fail I still have the images


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## eezy (Apr 13, 2018)

Apart from laptops crashing, I've had flash drives, hard drives and SD cards all go down on me and not be able to recover the data. I mean reputable brands as well.

I'm thinking the safest way is on a cloud based storage. Much as I hate anything Google, Google Drive has been reliable so far and makes large files reasonably easy to share


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