How to Store Your Digital Photos

I’ll never not encourage you to print your digital photos. That’s why I include a print credit with all my collections - to help you get prints made while you’re thinking about it, so you don’t forget to get your photos out of your computer and onto your walls or into a book, where they’ll be seen. 

That will always be my main goal. I see the good that happens when our kids see themselves in photos, and since they can’t see themselves on your computer or in your phone all the time, getting the photos into their hands is the main objective. We do that by printing small prints for bedrooms, making big prints for galleries, and creating books they can put their hands on. Printing is important.

But I actually have nothing against digital images. Digitals are amazing. You don’t want to only have the printed photos. You need backups. You want to send the digitals to people who are far away. You need to prepare for emergencies like fires and floods and natural disasters that force you to leave the photos behind (God forbid). 

You want your photos to be in a place where the kids can find them later. 

You want them to be organized, somehow, and safe. Let’s talk about how we can keep your photos safe for the future. 

Put your digital eggs in multiple baskets.

Don’t store your photos in one place. I mean, do store them all in one place, so they’re organized, but then have backups of that place, in another place. Did I say place enough? Let’s get specific: 

Store your photos in the cloud, like Google Photos or Apple Photos. But also download those photos to a folder on your computer or external hard drive. Cloud subscription services are just that - subscription services. You don’t own those locations, and if Google or Apple (or whatever cloud service you use) decided to shut down one day, you’d have very little chance of retrieving those photos. Don’t get scared, make backups. 

You should also use a backup service for your computer/ hard drive. I like Backblaze, and I’ve been using them for 10 years. There are lots of good services for backing up your computer.  

Organize with purpose. 

I’ve found that organizing by date is the easiest way to organize, and makes the most sense. People who organize their photos based on who is in them are into chaos, in my opinion. If that’s you, then great, do you. But please don’t rename all your photos with people’s names and then attempt to hire me to put together a yearbook for you. 

I suggest you organize by date, with the year first. I do (year.month.day) format: 2024.11.26 is today’s date. It keeps everything sorted in order, and is easy to remember and find things. Computers don’t like slashes (/) and they get confused when you put the month or day first. Year first, with periods between the sections. 

Don’t hide your photos.

Share your photos with family members. Let them help you by storing a backup copy with them (don’t depend on that as your backup, use a service like Backblaze) while also bringing them joy as they get to see the photos on a regular basis too. I have a habit of stashing our family photos on my computer (with multiple backups) but not sending them to my partner. That’s silly, I’m sure he wants to see our photos as much as I do. Send your partner a copy of the folder with the photos in it and then you have another backup, wherever they choose to keep it. 

Keep track of your tech. 

We were in the car the other day and my son asked me what a pocket in his library book was for. It was a pocket for a CD that had long since been lost. “What’s a CD?” he asked me. Which brings me to this tip. If you’re currently storing photos on CDs or disks, this is your flashing-red-light warning to move them off of those storage devices and upgrade, asap. Most computers don’t come with CD drives or disk drives anymore, so you might need to buy an external CD drive to plug into your computer for that. 

Check your storage devices regularly and make sure to update external hard drives every 5-7 years. It’s not a matter of if something will fail, it’s when. (Another good reason to use a backup system that will save a copy of your hardware for that day.) Write the date of purchase on your external hard drives and use Black Friday and Cyber Monday to find replacement hard drives when needed. 

Remember to actually look at your photos. 

While this is a pretty easy way to save your digital images for the future, you still need to check up on them every once in a while. Set a date for every 3-6 months that reoccurs on your calendar, and check your tech, and make sure your third party backups are working properly. 

It’s also a good time to go through your Google Photos or Apple Photos and delete all those grocery store snaps you sent to your partner (“is this the right brand?”) over the last 3-6 months, and all the duplicate selfies your son took of himself, so your storage doesn’t fill up earlier than it should. 

Creating a consistent system for storing your digital photos means you’ll have them for a long time, and be able to pass them down and show them to your kids later. 

And also, don’t forget to print them. I can help with that.