Storage Solutions

Hey all,

My first post here in the Darkroom but I'm looking forward to posting a lot more...


I'm just getting back into photography after a long hiatus. I'm wondering what you all do for photo storage and sharing?


Does everyone have an external drive they use?
Do you keep all of your photos on your desktop and backup to an external drive?
Do you use a cloud service?


Let me know! I'm interested in how everyone manages their photo files!

I use a NAS. I'm not crazy about paying over and over again for cloud services when I can handle safely backing stuff up myself AND still have it be available to me from anywhere. I do occasionally put some photos on Adobe cloud, but that's free with my copy of Photoshop and Lightroom. It's definitely not my primary means of backup and storage.

Welcome, by the way.

The best solution is to upload them to the Darkroom We want to see your photos!

Photos are just like any other type of data. What that means to me is that they get backed up to external hard drives. I have two external hard drives. I back up most frequently to one hard drive, but every now and then I do a backup to the other drive as well. Likely an imperfect system, but I know that in an emergency, I could grab my computer, grab the drive that has the most recent backup, and run for the hills.

Other than that there are a few documents that I keep in the cloud, but it's just a small handful.

Welcome In

Personally, I keep my files in a folder on my desktop, and on two separate USB drives, as well as Imgur for the ones I will end up posting online somewhere. Most of my better stuff I load a pic or two up daily on Instagram. I know nothing is completely fail safe, but I think I have enough back up files going on that I should be alright. I hope!

EDIT: Sorry, this may be way more than you're asking, but just where to keep photos isn't all there is to photography

You don't want my advice, I'm horrible with photos, LOL. Been burned once a long time ago and didn't learn. Now I have photos everywhere.

I had an old PC that broke. Had all my photos on a 2nd hard drive on that PC. I am still in the process of getting them off. I bought a USB drive enclosure and need to sort through the entire hard drive and get all my files off yet so I can reformat the drive and use it for backup.

I shoot in RAW with a Panasonic superzoom camera and use an old version of Lightroom for photo processing. My old version does not support the Panasonic RAW files so this is my workflow.....

I have a folder PHOTOGRAPHY. Within this folder, I have 2nd tier folders of the YEAR. 3rd tier within the YEAR I have each MONTH.

I also have a TEMP SORT folder that I dump the photos (RAW and JPEG files, 2 files each photo) in from the camera card. I then batch rename the files adding the date to the beginning of the files in the format of yyyy.mm.dd. (This is done with batch file renaming program called Total Commander. It is really easy to rename all the files at once or add various info to the beginning or ending of the file names.)

Once all the files are renamed with the date, I run Adobe DGN converter to convert the RAW files from the Panasonic camera to a lossless format that my version of Lightroom supports. After this, I move the files from the TEMP SORT folder to the proper YEAR/MONTH folder.

My workflow then is to start Lightroom and import from the folder I moved the files to. It will only import new files and will ignore the JPEG file if there is a lossless DNG file of the same name. From there I can add keywords to each photo or a batch of photos for easier hunting later.

Next is the sorting of the images. There are various ways to rate and to view the files in Lightroom. I first set the filter to show "non flagged photos." I walk through all the photos selecting a keep flag or reject flag until I've gone through them all. Reset the filter to show "keep" photos and I'm back to viewing all I want to work on. From there it is just my photo processing with cropping the 4:3 photos to 4x6 ratio (to 8x10 ratio for portrait orientated photos), white balance, exposure, levels, and sharpening.

Lightroom is a non-destructive photo editor. It keeps a database of your edits rather than changing the photo file itself. Therefore you still have all your photos in their originality. When I am done processing the photos I export them to a final JPEG in whatever resolution I want to have. I use Dropbox for an online host for posting photos to forums and other sites. I have categorized folder hierarchy in Dropbox such as "Cycling/800" and "Cycling/1024" for my cycling riding in 800 pixel max edge or 1024 pixel max edge. I have Paddling (the kayak, not paddling women, LOL), Personal, Vacation, etc as categories. From these folders I can post here, other forums, and create albums on Facebook.

What I stupidly never have done was never backed up. That is why I am currently trying to clean up the hard drive I have in the USB enclosure so I can reformat it and use it as back up. I have another hard drive from that old PC I will clean up and reformat as well. It is always a very good idea to backup to not only an external hard drive at regular intervals, but also do a 2nd backup and keep that backup at a different location such as work. I'll do that with the 2nd hard drive I have once I clean that one up.

I also have to backup the Lightroom database which I have never done. It should be still on the old hard drive from edits I've done on that PC, but it would look for the photos in the wrong places and is just all messed up. So I'm starting over with sorting and editing photos that date back to 2007 since there are a good many I want to eventually print in poster size to hang on the walls now that I am single again.

Thanks everyone!

I use Lightroom to develop my photos and keep things organized in there. All of my photos are currently on my desktop (which makes me really edgy) hence the call for help!

I'm starting to lean towards a NAS. I have a dropbox account that I use and enjoy it but would rather have my own drive rather than pay a monthly fee (although having stuff offsite is quite nice!).

In terms of NAS storage, what are my main options? I've heard of Syncology but that's the depth of my knowledge (and I have no idea how it works!).

If you'd rather not explain the NAS landscape, any hints, links, etc on where to look would be greatly appreciated.


Thank you!

You need at least one off site backup in case of fire, earthquake, flood, theft, whatever.
If you're disciplined enough to carry a hard drive back and forth with you and copy to it religiously, then no problem. Otherwise you can get a terabyte of online storage for about $100 / year pretty much anywhere.

Welcome to the darkroom. Looking forward to seeing your photos.

I just backup to a external hard drive.

I keep my photos on my computer hard drive, and back the whole thing up using an external HD and Time Machine.

When I was doing more important stuff for clients they were backed up in various locations, and periodically migrated... so on and so forth.

Now my photos are just for me, and I do not have various locations with equipment to store stuff. Every now and then I will back selected stuff to a third drive and keep it in a different part of the house. Wont help if the whole place burns up, but might be extra insurance against burglary.

I have mine stored on my local computer (in Lightroom), with a copy on my NAS, and another backup on an external HDD that doesn't get powered on all the time.

Additionally, I have lower res jpegs uploaded to my google photo account. While not as high res as the originals, they are still good enough quality to download and print at the local kiosk.

I have mine stored on my main computer with a backup on an external LaCie rugged drive. In addition to that, I have everything backed up online as well (CrashPlan). From being a computer field technician I've met far too many people who have lost years and years of irreplaceable photos.

wazabees said:

I have mine stored on my main computer with a backup on an external LaCie rugged drive. In addition to that, I have everything backed up online as well (CrashPlan). From being a computer field technician I've met far too many people who have lost years and years of irreplaceable photos.

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Do you use the minute to minute backup with CrashPlan? Just wondering if it bogs down your computer much.

I have mine from all sources camera, iPhone, iPad stored on Google Photos. I can then access all of my photo from any device. Also cross platforms. I can access my photo from my windows based computer.

Alacrity59 said:

Do you use the minute to minute backup with CrashPlan? Just wondering if it bogs down your computer much.

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The CrashPlan Windows application is a massive memory hog, unfortunately. I have plenty of RAM in my computer so it doesn't get bogged down too much. I have different backup strategies for different backup sets. Some run "always", while others run "at specified times". Apparently I currently have 3TB backed up.

wazabees said:

The CrashPlan Windows application is a massive memory hog, unfortunately. I have plenty of RAM in my computer so it doesn't get bogged down too much. I have different backup strategies for different backup sets. Some run "always", while others run "at specified times". Apparently I currently have 3TB backed up.

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I have a bit of a problem not enough culling, especially with pictures. Your 3TB has me beat hands down. Maybe time for a mid year resolution for me so I don't catch up.

Alacrity59 said:

I have a bit of a problem not enough culling, especially with pictures. Your 3TB has me beat hands down. Maybe time for a mid year resolution for me so I don't catch up.

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3TB total, not only photos, luckily! My collection of photos have probably reached about 30k raw images. Which is a fair chunk of that 3TB.

Alacrity59 said:

I have a bit of a problem not enough culling, especially with pictures. Your 3TB has me beat hands down. Maybe time for a mid year resolution for me so I don't catch up.

Click to expand...

Have you thought about uploading them to Google Photos? If you have it set to the high quality setting (which is still good enough to print) it is unlimited photo storage.
Just a thought

KeepsItClean said:

Does everyone have an external drive they use?
Do you keep all of your photos on your desktop and backup to an external drive?
Do you use a cloud service?

Click to expand...

I have an external drive that automatically backs up all my files as soon as I copy them onto my regular hard drive.
One mouse click further, all my personal files on the hard drive will be copied onto a NAS (RAID level 1 = mirroring), so I have a double backup of all my personal files and a weekly backup of my entire system (OS + apps). I also have stored a few of my photos in JPG format "in the cloud", although I'd never rely on cloud solutions as the sole means of backing up my personal data.

I've been into computing for more than 25 years and have always followed a backup strategy with at least two copies of my personal files on my hard drive, either onto external disks or NAS systems. I can safely say that until this day, I've never lost any personal files owing to viruses, hard drive failures or accidental deletion.

One HD on my PC, and 2 separate external drives, have close to 1TB with a fair number of slides that haven't been scanned yet.
I upload the good ones to my Pbase account for sharing with people.