Video Killed the Radio Star (and the baby book)
December 15, 2020 1:57 PM Subscribe
Finally going through 10+ years of baby pictures and videos taken on various iPhones and uploaded to my computer hard drive and Google Drive. But I'm totally out of space there now. So what to do?
Long-term: What's the best way to store these .jpg and .mov files? Yes, I can print the photos and put them in a box (or make a Shutterfly photobook or whatever) but that won't work for the videos obv. Do I get an external hard drive? Not USB, not CDROM, so....?
Short-term: How can I easily upload and share the videos, especially, with family members (who are begging for them actually)? There's a bunch of them and the files are large.
Not interested in using Instagram or any other social platform. I'm sure I'm missing some obvious answer but I know the Hivemind can hope me.
Long-term: What's the best way to store these .jpg and .mov files? Yes, I can print the photos and put them in a box (or make a Shutterfly photobook or whatever) but that won't work for the videos obv. Do I get an external hard drive? Not USB, not CDROM, so....?
Short-term: How can I easily upload and share the videos, especially, with family members (who are begging for them actually)? There's a bunch of them and the files are large.
Not interested in using Instagram or any other social platform. I'm sure I'm missing some obvious answer but I know the Hivemind can hope me.
Google One is I think $24 a year for an additional 100 GB.
posted by COD at 2:28 PM on December 15, 2020
posted by COD at 2:28 PM on December 15, 2020
short term, second vote for something like google photos, it is pretty easy.
long term, what kind of planning horizon are you talking? do you want your great-great-grand kids to see the photos? Print them. Imagine someone besides yourself looking through 10+ years of photos and trying to find meaning, or value. Good prints can be water damaged, bent, half-burned in a fire and they will survive. It won't matter if you have terabytes of images stored somewhere 50 years from now. Video is tough because formats change, most people I know don't have DVD players anymore.
i'm a digital asset management systems guy, and if I was designing a long term solution for an organization, i'd use something like Preservica, which is an enterprise archive management system that will even keep your file formats up-to-par with modern outputs.
My extended family actually uses a couple of different Shutterfly accounts to share all the old family photos from the 1800s, but that is for hundreds of photos, not thousands, and so it works.
if anyone is looking for project ideas, how about a machine learning process that will categorize thousands of photos, tag them, and then choose the "best" ones to save--and then delete everything else. Your descendants may huddle around server farms for warmth, not knowing what they were for or who built them, only that they make the Cloud. ;-)
posted by th3ph17 at 2:42 PM on December 15, 2020 [3 favorites]
long term, what kind of planning horizon are you talking? do you want your great-great-grand kids to see the photos? Print them. Imagine someone besides yourself looking through 10+ years of photos and trying to find meaning, or value. Good prints can be water damaged, bent, half-burned in a fire and they will survive. It won't matter if you have terabytes of images stored somewhere 50 years from now. Video is tough because formats change, most people I know don't have DVD players anymore.
i'm a digital asset management systems guy, and if I was designing a long term solution for an organization, i'd use something like Preservica, which is an enterprise archive management system that will even keep your file formats up-to-par with modern outputs.
My extended family actually uses a couple of different Shutterfly accounts to share all the old family photos from the 1800s, but that is for hundreds of photos, not thousands, and so it works.
if anyone is looking for project ideas, how about a machine learning process that will categorize thousands of photos, tag them, and then choose the "best" ones to save--and then delete everything else. Your descendants may huddle around server farms for warmth, not knowing what they were for or who built them, only that they make the Cloud. ;-)
posted by th3ph17 at 2:42 PM on December 15, 2020 [3 favorites]
I use Google One/Drive/Photos for sharing with people and general photo access. Pretty much every morning Photos will send me a notification with a photo I'd taken on this day X years ago, which is usually quite nice. It will automatically make galleries and collage photos for you and used to make movies, which I thought was great. My kids love to take my phone and use it to look at videos of themselves when they were babies/toddlers. Drive and Photos used to be integrated so that you could upload stuff to a folder in Drive and it would show up in your photos. Now you need to do a manual import from Drive. I'm not a fan of that extra step.
I store everything on a NAS drive in my home. The NAS is what does the uploading to Google Drive, so I can quickly copy things over my home network from my computer to the NAS and then it'll take it's time uploading it to the cloud. Every year I buy a portable hard drive and make a copy of all my photos. That hard drive is kept in my desk in my office.
Having multiple copies is important. When I went on my honeymoon in 2006 I carted around a "portable" hard drive and would periodically stop off at internet cafes to copy photos from my camera to the hard drive and also to burn DVDs of the photos. When I got home and was copying the photos from my hard drive to my computer my wife accidentally knocked the hard drive off the table and killed it. Thankfully I had the DVDs so nothing was lost.
Curation is a big thing because no one will have the time to go through 10+ years of everything. Don't get me wrong, my Google Photos goes back to 2006 and it is cool to have everything available on my phone no matter where I am, but it helps to regularly select your best, printworthy, photos and either tag them or put a copy in a folder so that you can easily get to the good stuff without wading through everything. There'll be times when having everything is useful but more often than not you just want the highlights.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 3:14 PM on December 15, 2020 [2 favorites]
I store everything on a NAS drive in my home. The NAS is what does the uploading to Google Drive, so I can quickly copy things over my home network from my computer to the NAS and then it'll take it's time uploading it to the cloud. Every year I buy a portable hard drive and make a copy of all my photos. That hard drive is kept in my desk in my office.
Having multiple copies is important. When I went on my honeymoon in 2006 I carted around a "portable" hard drive and would periodically stop off at internet cafes to copy photos from my camera to the hard drive and also to burn DVDs of the photos. When I got home and was copying the photos from my hard drive to my computer my wife accidentally knocked the hard drive off the table and killed it. Thankfully I had the DVDs so nothing was lost.
Curation is a big thing because no one will have the time to go through 10+ years of everything. Don't get me wrong, my Google Photos goes back to 2006 and it is cool to have everything available on my phone no matter where I am, but it helps to regularly select your best, printworthy, photos and either tag them or put a copy in a folder so that you can easily get to the good stuff without wading through everything. There'll be times when having everything is useful but more often than not you just want the highlights.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 3:14 PM on December 15, 2020 [2 favorites]
This thread is closed to new comments.
What's the actual amount of data? I still keep a copy of everything on my hard drive, but I've got a few terabytes of space there.
This isn't an answer about backup, for the record; it's about the methods I'm using to keep the photos accessible.
posted by sagc at 2:00 PM on December 15, 2020 [1 favorite]