apartment therapy changing the world, one room at a time

I have them on an external hard drive, but I also upload them to flickr.

I've got a combination. There are a ton on my computer, a nicely edited selection on Flickr for all the grandparents and faraway friends and relatives to keep an eye on, and after V's first birthday in a few weeks I plan to compile the best of her first year into a printed book from Blurb or a similar company. I love the idea of having them printed in a bound book instead of messing with fiddly prints!

Actually, I guess we also have prints made too, though, which we mail to her Great grandparents who aren't on the internet.

They are disorganized on external hard drives, laptops, and CDs of photos that my parents send! Some are also on Flickr and Facebook. Can you believe it! It will be a real nightmare to sit down and finally start sorting through them all.

I think our too large memory card is to blame for the clutter. ;-)

I have them on my computer, external hard drive, facebook, prints and albums. haha. They're all nicely organized in all of these places though.

I'm a picture junkie.

i have them on my computer (which is almost shot because of it) and an external and i upload them to flickr. i am looking how to organize them and sync them with this method though, or another method that might be better.

Everything goes onto my hard drive first. Sorted by a year folder, then a date folder titled YYYYMMDD-event. All photos are backed up to an external hard drive.

Good ones are uploaded to Shutterfly, shared on a site for distant family to view & order if they like. I order from Shutterfly because the description I give each photo is printed on the back of the image along with the date each photo was taken; and I can order matte. (You can get matte prints from Costco too. )

My favorite prints go straight into an album. Duplicates are mailed to great grandmas.

Then there's all the old film stuff. Prints in albums, duplicates and negatives in photo boxes in date order.

My mom has bags of images not in albums, not sorted, or dated. I promised I wouldn't let that happen to my memories!

Warning to mommies and daddies: HDDs fail all the time. If your child's pictures are precious to you, back it up to an external HDD. Even better, back it up to an online backup like iDrive for piece of mind.

One note about Flickr: When you upload photos to it, there is a slight image degradation. So if you're concerned about storing the best quality, Flickr is not the answer.

I've got a question for MarvynAndMary about Flickr.
I know that if you have a free Flickr account, people can only download the "large" version of a picture, which is way smaller pixel-wise than the original. But I pay the yearly $25 for their Pro account, and thought that the "original" size my family can download is the same as my actual original. I was wondering if you could explain further about the image degradation you refer to. Is Flickr further compressing our photos?
I'm looking for an online backup service too, as I worry about having all my pictures in one place. Do you recommend iDrive over the rest of them or are they all roughly the same in your opinion? Do I have to worry about online backup services further compressing my image data? Thanks for your help!

Cool! I do EXACTLY what star3night does. Except my grandmother is the one with the bags of loose photos. I loved looking through those bags as a kid and it killed me as a teen/young adult getting into genealogy that her photos were undated, unlabled, unorganized and sometimes faded and torn. I became extra-organized as a result. I'm also a professional photographer and my current organization method works really well when storing/backing-up large quantities of photos for various clients.

Actually this past week I have spent going through 10 years of physical pictures. We are not photo album people here so it made no sense to us having a whole shelf full. I scanned all the pics I wanted to keep copies of and then shredded everything. I feel so free and now I know that our pics will get looked at more as we often look through our iphoto just never the physical albums. I plan on copying all the pics to disc and putting them in our fire safe lock box also.

BACK UP YOUR PHOTOS! Don't learn this lesson the hard way!
I now have 3 years worth of digital photos that I can only view in the tiny resolution they were being held in on my Ipod.
I now also have a giant Ipod and have set it to save the full resolution versions of my photos, plus an external hard drive, plus an online account.
Never again.

And get those photos out of the sticky page albums too, the sticky stuff will eat your photos and in time they too will be lost.