All photos (phone, pocket camera, big dSLR) end up on my laptop, which is backed up locally and via Crashplan. I process them there (managing them with Lightroom, mostly), pick the ones I want to show the world, and put those on Flickr. Then if I'm particularly trolling for attention I put them on Facebook as well.
Dropbox (my phone automatically uploads), phone storage, and occasional bulk copies to hard drive.
I periodically dump everything into flickr, onto a local backup drive, and into OneDrive (the latter only because I somehow ended up with a ridiculously large free quota, and I don't use it for anything else). Then I wonder when I'm ever going to get around to going through these zillions of piled up digital photos to find some that might actually be worth keeping.
We have an enormous pile of old photos loaded into Aperture (it seemed like a good idea at the time) on an iMac, which we periodically back up locally. Only my wife can find things in the folder structure there, but at least everything is saved. There is an inchoate idea that she will go through them one day and organize them.
I have a much smaller collection of less than a hundred photos that I've loaded into Dropbox and shared on Facebook (not that there's any necessary connection, just that I did those two things with pretty much the same set of photos). Also there is the very sporadically updated family blog, which was mostly a 2008 - 2010 thing but is still there on Typepad.
If the kids ever go through the whole collection of materials, they will probably conclude that mommy loved the older one more and daddy loved the younger one more. We should probably leave a note with our will explaining that it is really more a question of who was using which digital media when.
My iPhoto library going back about 12 years is split between two users on my computer. I tried merging them by exporting from older then importing to newer but that lost all the organization on the moved ones, events, ratings, etc. Is there an easier way to merge two libraries and keep everything?
Once that's done I plan to backup somewhere online. Currently we have a physical backup in the house but nothing offsite.
I consider by phone to be my offsite backup. After every time I almost lose my phone, I copy the photo directory to my computer.
4.last
If what I've seen of photo albums is any guide that's probably not a bad impression to leave: as often as not the effect is a more direct "the older one was more interesting".
When my mother's family was packing up old photo albums I got to see this in practice, because each successive child's album was a little thinner and less well documented. By the time they got to the youngest child the album was completely empty, with a few unorganized baby photos tucked into it like a bookmark. He was mildly put out by this.
The Library of Congress has suggestions.
I copy them from my phone to my computer every so often. That reminds me, I'm overdue. How do I sort them once they're on my computer? What if my computer crashes? Uhhh...
The good news is, the wedding photos were on Dropbox from the start, because we have/had a far-flung clan and it was the easiest way to share with them. I haven't checked in a while (yes, I should) but I assume they're still there, and I know we also have them on a disc somewhere or other. So that's the important stuff.
I've been meaning to organize wherever my pictures are on my computer and delete the ones I wouldn't really care about and I should probably set up a backup, but (a) that's a big job, since some of my computer stuff has just been carried over from one dead hard drive or outmoded computer to another for probably literally 10 years in successive nested folders, (b) why bother, the whole point of digital storage is that it's easy to add more or move, and (c) it's a priority, but it's a much, much lower priority than several other chores at the moment. And I'm procrastinating on those, so...
iPhoto. My computer started to crash so I offloaded the movies onto another disk, then I ended up replacing the hard drive with one twice as big so now my movies are separate for no good reason.
I am planning to back them all up to Flickr, OneDrive or something else, so this is helpful. With world enough and time I'd make a bunch of photo albums too.
iPhoto has 50,000 photos that are backed up to Time Machine. Before having A, there was really no need to be worried about keeping 1,000 variations of each type of bird I've photographed. Now with A, I think she's sufficiently documented on my blog and Instagram that it would be okay if I lost the pictures on my laptop.
I have some hard plastic holders that let you stack a few hundred pix in each, up in a 3rd floor bedroom that nobody uses much since the kids left home: also a few photo albums in a built-in book shelf in the hallway at the top of the stairs on the second floor.
For pix from the last 5 years, a bunch of shutterfly albums.
There isn't much from between 5 and 15 years ago, which is pretty much when electronic cameras came into play, and my cell phone is about 12 or 13 years old, so no camera on it and all the problems and aggravations that come with that.
iPhoto users should be aware that iPhoto is being replaced in a big way.
By the way, iPhoto is being retired soon.
That was weird.
I'm reluctant to give apple control of my photo collection since apple already has control of my music collection through iTunes and the interface has deteriorated so much in recent updates that I can't figure out how to do anything with it anymore. I know how to play songs, and shuffle songs. Anything else and I'm lost. It used to be so easy.
I was thinking of getting a synology NAS for handling our photos and music once we move in to our new apartment (along with general backup purposes). Anyone have any experiences, good or bad, with NAS setups?
I have a Synology and mostly like it. The 4-drive version was overkill, I think, since disks keep getting bigger (but having a spare drive handy for a 2-drive box would not be dumb). If you want to do that you probably want to make sure the rest of the network is up to pushing a lot of bits around - gigabit switches, 802.11n at a minimum for wireless. I have thought about moving my bulk-photo collection there, instead of my laptop, but until I run out of space on the laptop there's really no point. Lightroom supposedly handles having the bulk of photos "elsewhere" pretty well; you just need local storage for the index and thumbnails.
16: Turn on the sidebar if it isn't on; that made a lot of my irritations go away. I don't know why they keep making it off by default. But I agree that the interface has really gone backwards.
I have a NAS (made by QNAP). Then I have an external drive connected to that, so photos are put in a folder on the NAS, then backed up to the external drive. Soon I'll also put them all online somewhere, maybe Amazon Glacier.
Your Anus immortalised in solid bronze. We are expanding our services to offer bespoke anus castings, set as an individual bronze artwork for your loved ones. Feel free to contact us to discuss the process and logistics prior to booking at info@edibleanus.com.
A bronze anus would make an plausible doorbell plate, or bottle-opener, but photo storage?
(Not going to follow any explanatory links.)
You should see the accompanying thumb drive.
The Dorothy Sayers story with the victim cast into a silver couch gets an update.
I'm so out of touch with technology I don't even know what a NAS is. (Not the rapper, right?)
I see. Network-attached storage. I get by with a couple of external hard drives, but I suspect I take a lot fewer photos than the norm.
Most of my disk space needs come from simulation results.
simulation results
You download all the cumshot videos from pornhub?
25: Is that the grossest and creepiest? Yes. Well, there's also the one where the guy denies his . . . wife? her thyroid medicine so she is slow and bewildered.
Mine go to the Google+ thingy that Androids use. I usually (though I'm a bit behind) download them to my computer and back them up to an external hard drive.
This (in my nerdly opinion, at least) is easy compared to dealing with dozens of photo albums, boxes of photos, boxes of negatives, framed photos, etc. My FIL produced those by the zillion and my MIL just got them all confused when she took over.
I do worry about what happens in 50-100 years (we have photos that old, inherited from a couple generations back), but that will be my kids' problem. Will Google still exist in 100 years? Dropbox? Apple?
Turn on the sidebar if it isn't on; that made a lot of my irritations go away.
Actually that helped a lot! Thanks!
Utterly unrelated, but in WMYBSALB related news this is the best twitter bot ever.
In other WMYBSALB news, I'm knitting a hat with that message in Morse code if anyone wants one. I don't have a problem; I could stop anytime.
Knitting STOP I can stop at any time STOP
The article in 35 is awesome. It's like the moral philosophy example of the guy who spends his life cutting his grass one blade at a time with a fingernail clippers, except that contrary to the intended intuition it sounds like of.. fulfilling.
31: I figure the digital photographs likely to survive a century from now will be those we take as much trouble over as the survivors from a century ago required.
Anyone have any experiences, good or bad, with NAS setups?
Jay Z votes "no".
34: Better than this one? (Or its NSFW counterpart?)
Who knew brushing your teeth was so dirty. (That appears to be the computer's default interpretation of anything entering someone's mouth.)
It's probably good advice, though.
I'm reminded of a story from high school, girl #1 was telling girl #2 that #1 had been giving a blowjob, and when he came in her mouth she ran to the bathroom and grabbed his toothbrush to clean out her mouth, and girl #2 was disgusted that girl #1 was willing to share someone else's toothbrush.
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More snow coming. That's its own storage problem.
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Turn on the sidebar if it isn't on
This to neb or whoever re: "latest comments".
Thanks, whoever or whatever just fixed the blog.
Toothbrushes are like standards -- no one wants to use someone else's. Semen, on the other hand, is a common exchange format.
Also, seriously, the Library of Congress advice is decent benchmark/checklist/something-or-other to compare against whatever you're doing with your photos.
If you're concerned about them surviving a century or more, you'll have to keep paying attention to your storage and then hope someone else takes over doing that. There's really no option to drop things in some box and let it sit, although you can automate a lot of the maintenance if you set yourself up for that.
There was a story recently, I can't remember where, where someone blamed a cloud service for losing his photos. It turned out, IIRC, he put the photos on the cloud service and didn't keep a local copy. Dropbox/Google + or Drive/SkyDrive/OneDrive/etc. are unlikely to disappear overnight, but it's generally not a good idea to trust them as a sole place to store things.
Story in 30 is the creepiest by far. A sluggish thyroid is a common vulnerability!
I used to be in the top 1000 Wikipedia contributors, until everyone else realized that if you make 5000 edits, all of which change one word at a time, that counts the same as making 1 5000 word edit.
Wikipedia seems to have quite a few problems with its policies.
I have a NAS in a cupboard where I stick our photos. However, because I'm in the process of chucking the old PC i used to use, some of our stuff is still sitting on there and not quite migrated to the NAS.* Quite a few of them have backup in the form of silver and gelatin on an acetate base. [ahem]
There's a much smaller chunk of those on Flickr and/or Facebook, but only a tiny percentage of the whole.
* at some point I'll probably chuck all of them into our University's tape backup system, if I can get it together to be organised.
re: 51
Yes, as you know. I work on this problem for a big academic institution. It's non-trivial. I don't really take my own advice when it comes to my own photos, though.
I have about 12 miniDV tapes of video from early kid years, I should probably digitize it at some point. Any services that will do a good not too expensive job of that?
By digitize I mean convert into accessible files, of course. Which I should then back up to tape to make sure they're safe.
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I was in the card store looking for Valentine cards, and I noticed something peculiar. There are Valentine cards specific to every relationship imaginable: wife, husband, girlfriend, boyfriend, son, daughter, best friend, mother, etc. But NONE for illicit paramours. Where is the "Forbidden Love" section, I ask? Wake up Hallmark Greetings! You are missing a huge, huge opportunity here!
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You need to go to the card rack at CVS. Everybody in a CVS is hiding something.
57. We got all our old kid tapes copied to DVDs. It was done by a guy who used to run the video rental store in our town. He did a creditable job, though it was purely capture, not any "film editing." My advice is to see if there is still a video rental store in your area, and ask them if they know anyone who does it.
59. Get one of those empty-inside (/ouch) cards with something cute on the front (puppies! kittens! capybaras!) and write your own message, unless you are worried about handwriting analysis during your upcoming divorce.
everyone else realized that if you make 5000 edits, all of which change one word at a time, that counts the same as making 1 5000 word edit
Wait, 5000 one-word edits count the same as making one 5,000-word edit, or they count as 5,000 times as many edits? Because if they count the same, then that seems totally reasonable. Making 5,000 separate one-word edits would take a lot more time and effort than making one single 5,000-word edit, unless you've gone to elaborate lengths to automate the one-word edit process in some way (like Mr. "comprised of"), and even then it's not clear that it would be a lot less work.
People with actual romantic feelings for other people, as one would generally expect with illicit paramours, don't buy pre-printed Valentine's day cards. They buy them actual gifts and hand-write meaningful love notes. Pre-printed cards are for stale, lifeless relationships.
61.last: What about cutting words out of a newspaper, ransom letter-style? Could be romantic in the right context, right?
If Tolstoy was right, and why wouldn't someone who eventually decided that sex was bullshit be right, every unhappy family is unhappy its own way. This would mean the people in the stale, lifeless relationships should be the ones with feelings too different to be able to use a pre-printed card. The actual romantic feeling crowd is experiencing a very limited set of emotions that should lend itself to mass production very well.
66: That's exactly why the stale, lifeless relationships need professional writers to craft the messages for them. And why the card aisle has 30,000 different cards. If all you want to say is "I enjoy your sex a lot!", any amateur can put that into words.
Roses are red,
violet are blue,
I'm at my happiest
when I'm fucking you.
Of course, it's also possible that I'm a greeting card savant who missed his calling in life.
Well, let's test it. Write one that inoffensively conveys: I'm not yet ready to admit we're no longer in love, and society has that today is supposed to be a celebration of love, so here's a card that says I love you.
"With heartfelt wishes love and kindness, Happy Valentine's Day to my husband/wife".
Also please someone write a genuine love poem to the sidebar, so that it won't decide to leave us for good. I know sometimes it may seem like we take it for granted, but when it's gone, there's a hole in our lives that nothing else can fill. We love you, sidebar. Please come back. Please.
74 is good. I think you've missed your calling.
I copied that from a card on a coworker's desk.
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou hasn't seen me since August.
This thread got pretty great. Pity no one will ever see it.
75. Sure, that's easy to say, but exactly what sex acts (decorously described, of course) will you perform on the sidebar to convince it to come back?