Best way to archive pictures saved on my laptop.

Discussion in 'Visual Arts' started by ALAN SICHERMAN, May 25, 2019.

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  1. ALAN SICHERMAN

    ALAN SICHERMAN Van Cortlandt Park, Bronx, NY Thread Starter

    Location:
    Cleveland, OH
    Shoebox sent my wife an email that it is closing and attached a program to export our photo's to the laptop. It turned out she had 27,000 pictures saved there! It took hours and hours but I now have them on my computer. I would prefer to archive them in some way and take them off the computer. I was thinking maybe DVD but I don't think they can hold enough. Does anyone have any suggestions (thanks in advance)!
     
  2. Tim S

    Tim S Senior Member

    Location:
    East Tennessee
    two inexpensive usb drives - 1 is for a backup.

    I don't know how big your total files are, but I just grabbed a couple of 160 gig drives for 21.00 a piece.
     
  3. Damien DiAngelo

    Damien DiAngelo Forum Resident

    Location:
    Michigan, USA
    I looked thru my picture archive, and <>7,000 pictures took 4.4GB.
    A DVD holds 4.7GB, so yeah go with the USB drive solution.
    Like Tim S said above, get 2. Keep one for backup.
    Once you do that, try to connect each drive at least once a year, just to make sure they still work. If you go with physical hard drives, in my experience they don't really like to sit for years and years un-used, so firing them up will help with their longevity.
    If you find that one doesn't work, then you can still buy a new drive and copy the working one to it.
     
    ALAN SICHERMAN likes this.
  4. Chris DeVoe

    Chris DeVoe RIP Vickie Mapes Williams (aka Equipoise)

    Google Photos.

    Everyone who has a Gmail account has access to Google Photos. Install it on your phone and access it via your computer. Google does a far better job of backing up photos than you ever will - several of the computer security experts I trust have pointed out that Google has never lost any data for anybody so far.

    Once you put it up there, Google will make all their search capabilities available on your archive, identifying faces and places and objects. There's no limit on the number of pictures you can have up there, and no limit to the number of albums you can create.

    Before anyone mentions it, yes, they're using these photos as raw data to get better and better at identifying faces and places and objects. But unless you're in the witness protection program, that's not really a concern. It's a trade-off, but one that I see as worthwhile.

    If you're freaked out, create a separate Gmail account just for the photos and use it for nothing else, and don't link it to your phone, so they have nothing to correlate these pictures to. I have a dozen different Gmail accounts.
     
  5. Chris DeVoe

    Chris DeVoe RIP Vickie Mapes Williams (aka Equipoise)

    Just wanted to mention, a friend of mine is stress-testing Google's "unlimited photos" policy. She runs an estate sale company, and takes hundreds of photographs every single day. She puts up a Google Photos shared album on her website for clients to look at, and it gives her a wonderful archive of everything that she's ever sold. So she's looking for "a painting of a woman and a dog" that was sold in an estate sale 2 years ago, she can easily find it.
     
    Stanley1970 likes this.
  6. Jeff Kent

    Jeff Kent Forum Resident

    Location:
    Mt. Kisco, NY
    A friend was showing me this the other day. It created a file called Bars with every picture she'd taken in a bar. It even had pictures from her parents' house, because they had a small bar set up. Crazy, but useful.
     
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  7. Chris DeVoe

    Chris DeVoe RIP Vickie Mapes Williams (aka Equipoise)

    Also, it's easy to get your photos back from Google. You can download them anytime, any individual photo, groups or every single thing you've ever shot. And they do a wonderful job maintaining hard drives, cycling units in and out of service.

    The only downside is that the images are compressed, but honestly I looked closely at images I've uploaded uncompressed and re-downloaded from Google and the compression artifacts look less lossy than standard jpeg.
     
    Last edited: May 25, 2019
    Stanley1970 likes this.
  8. the pope ondine

    the pope ondine Forum Resident

    Location:
    Virginia
    I gotta go with flashdrive, make 2, put one in safety deposit box, done
     
  9. Chris DeVoe

    Chris DeVoe RIP Vickie Mapes Williams (aka Equipoise)

    I'll go with Leo LaPorte's dictum that you don't really have a backup until it's in three places, at least one off-site.
     
    Rufus McDufus and subzro like this.
  10. fabre

    fabre Forum Resident

    Location:
    Germany
    That sounds pretty good.
    I'd take one usb drive and one ssd. I advise against the use of memory cards, many are of poor quality.

    Thanks for mentioning this. I wouldn't want to upload so many photos into the cloud because of things like this. Be sure to read the fine print first.
     
  11. Chris DeVoe

    Chris DeVoe RIP Vickie Mapes Williams (aka Equipoise)

    Unlike Facebook, Google lets you know what they've collected. Visit account.Google.com and you can see all of your search queries, all of your voice queries via Google Assistant, all of your photos. Someone please show me exactly where I visit to do that with Facebook.

    As I said, it's a reasonable trade-off. I haven't tagged all the people Google photos has identified with email addresses. So there's some pictures of a fat middle-aged guy with his wife, and a whole bunch of screenshots and photos of sales at ALDI and Costco. I'm not entirely sure what value Google derives from that, but compared to the cost of anybody else hosting thousands of photos, I'm getting the better half of the deal.

    Make no mistake, I'm more paranoid than average. I just go into all these things with my eyes wide open and calculate the cost/risk ratio.
     
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  12. fabre

    fabre Forum Resident

    Location:
    Germany
    (Sorry for this wall of text)
    Yes, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and others can do everything they want with any photo you upload. Sending photos via email is like sending postcards.
    I don’t trust Google and I don’t use most of their services but I am not kidding myself - you can’t escape Google or else a lot of things don’t work anymore. I read about an experiment a while ago where someone tried this and failed.

    I don’t fear that someone could see a few pictures of me (although I don’t like the idea) but when you think about the huge amounts of data these giants are amassing - photos, voice samples, fingerprints etc. - it does make a big difference I think.

    Google claims that they use photos in order to advance certain technologies but to what end? They have huge databases with tons of information from different services and different providers on hundreds of millions of people from all over the world. Maybe they haven’t put it in order yet but some time in the future they will have. (Look at the news regarding Gmail and your on- and off-line purchases. No one knows for sure for how long this has been going on.)
    Of course, it is impossible to process this data without the help of computers and maybe only a few humans have access to the data. Facebook profiles are already being harvested in order to manipulate or at least influence people.

    Maybe these pictures, voice samples and other bits and pieces are being used for making money through advertising now but I think this is only one of endless possibilities.
    Face recognition and voice recognition software are getting better and who knows what computers are being capable in the future.

    I do think that data harvesting might be interesting from a scientific point of view but I also think that the main reason for amassing data is mostly money or power or control.

    There have been several claims regarding artificial intelligence that have been proven wrong or flawed like the connection of faces and their sexual orientation.
    But this is not only about what is possible but also what can go wrong. These companies are too big already and they get all the information almost for free - a small trade-off. I don't know if it is small at all.
     
  13. Chris DeVoe

    Chris DeVoe RIP Vickie Mapes Williams (aka Equipoise)

    If I were to rank the giant Internet corporations by trust, Google would be at the top, and Facebook would be at the bottom, with the cable and phone companies right above them. I trust them enough that Google is both my ISP (Google Fiber) and my cell phone provider (Google Fi.) I do use a VPN for anything where I worry about security, but honestly, if you are not PGP signing all of your email and living your life as if you're in a hotel hosting the Blackhat conference you should probably accept that giant companies will have a profile of you.
     
    Vidiot likes this.
  14. Vidiot

    Vidiot Now in 4K HDR!

    Location:
    Hollywood, USA
    Laporte actually got that from noted photographer Peter Krogh, who has the "3-2-1 Backup Plan." And that does say that "you don't really own your data unless you have copies in at least 3 places." I know of some horrible cases where a fire destroyed both the original files and the backups... like the June 2008 Universal Studios studio fire.
     
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  15. ALAN SICHERMAN

    ALAN SICHERMAN Van Cortlandt Park, Bronx, NY Thread Starter

    Location:
    Cleveland, OH
    I took your advice and bought a 16 gig for $10 (Samsung) from Amazon and loaded it. Took hours and hours but it worked. Thanks again!
     
  16. ALAN SICHERMAN

    ALAN SICHERMAN Van Cortlandt Park, Bronx, NY Thread Starter

    Location:
    Cleveland, OH
    Along with a flash drive mentioned above, I took you advise as well and opened a Google account; I'm sending them the pictures as we speak. I opened a separate account. Thank You very much!
     
    Chris DeVoe likes this.
  17. Chris DeVoe

    Chris DeVoe RIP Vickie Mapes Williams (aka Equipoise)

    Glad to help!
     
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