How and Where to Store Your Photos?

How to store your photos? This is not a simple question, because you must take many things into account, from costs of long-term storage or online traffic to digital data security to convenience of processing and publishing. Therefore, this article is about how and where to store your photos.

Where to Store Your Photos for Different Purposes

Where to Store Photos for Digital Workflow

If you plan to process some photos, store these images on a local drive or on a NAS in your local network. A viable alternative is an FTP server, either local or Internet-connected. In all these cases, crucial parameters are quickness of data access and stability of network connection.

Where to Store Digital Photos for Long-Term Keeping

If you want to store a photo archive, the most convenient and readily available media is an external USB drive. Use some backup software (or copy your photos directly) to an external disk or an SD card to store photos. Any backup guide will tell you how to store photos to external hard drive.

Where to Store Digital Photos without a Computer

Some external USB drives also have screens to demonstrate stored images. These “mobile galleries” can also read SD and CF cards directly, but cost much more and also are a bit more fragile than common external HDDs or SDDs. You can store your photos from a card directly to one of these devices.

Where to Store Photos on Cloud

A modern alternative for all methods of image keeping described before is to store your digital photos on some cloud (perhaps a one that has a built-in viewer or even a simple image editor). How to store photos to cloud? Just like that for common files; please transfer your photos to a cloud with a browser!

  • You can also backup photos to cloud by using some software that allows selecting and copying image to selected storage. This option is also available for many image-processing solutions using either common or specialized cloud to store digital images.

Note: For some reasons, since July, 2019 Google Photo and Google Drive are not connected. How to store photos on Google Drive today? Just copy files into some folder on your Google Drive as described above — Google will take no difference between your photos and any other data!

How to Store Photos on Mac, PC or Linux-based Computer?

When you select where to store photos, the next question is how to store your collection to a proper place? As mentioned above, the most straightforward way is to use some file browser that can usually move photos to a local or external drive, SD card, FTP server or a cloud with a local synchronized folder.

Another way to store photos is to use some photo processing software that can create a bunch of stored image files in a selected location. Almost any typical solution, from Google Picasa to RawTherapee to Adobe Photoshop to Linux-based dcraw can move images to a selected place!

How to Store Digital Photos (Long-Term)?

This is a completely different task from creating a gallery. Firstly, select a convenient and reliable media to store such important things. (A RAID1 two-drive external disk or NAS is a good example.) Then use some backup software to create a solid, consistent photo archive in a place where to store your photos.

  • Photo backup software is often a part of more complex backup solution, but some dedicated clouds sometimes provide utilities for searching and storing photo files. Learn how to store photos by these utilities in user manuals.

Note: The additional compression of a photo archive is not a necessary thing, because most digital file formats also have internal compression algorithms, much more efficient for typical images than common LZW or ZIP methods. However, you can zip photos to make a solid archive file!

Because the digital world is a quickly growing place, you must know that new methods for storing your photos will appear here and there during time. Most of these methods are just variants of common approaches described here, but some can be brilliant and prosperous in future!