Pictures, My Mind Is Boggled

[SirSnookalot]

I seldom look at  the 100's of my pictures.  I've got pics stored in my pc, a few cloud services, google + and my smartphone, a lot of needless overlapping. Not only do I have freshwater and saltwater pictures, I have family pictures, events and all sorts of things.  Not all of it is under Sirsnookalot, which adds to the confusion.

I want to centralize everything but going thru all of this is a monumental task, that's too time time consuming.  I'm  thinking about deleting everything (all but my grandchildren) and start from scratch, it's hard to pull that trigger.  I wonder why I keep a picture of a 5 pounder laying next to a rod, that's anything but a photo op.

 

I'm leaning towards dropbox.

[Bluebasser86]

I have a free Photobucket account. Easy to upload to from my phone and easy to post pictures on the forums, and it's free. You can do different albums also if you're wanting to organize them. 

[Fishinthefish]

I would also suggest photobucket. You can create albums for family fish etc. the easiest process will most likely be to create an account and start with your old accounts and phones etc and scroll through only uploading what you want to keep. Then delete everything on the device or account and start on a new one. Spreading it out will make life easier, I would personally start with whatever it is that you capture pictures with primarily. That way as you add new ones you can sort them as you take them into photobucket without just making the task of that device harder when you get to it.

[SirSnookalot]

 I appreciate the suggestions, I've had photobucket, tiny pics, image shack and imgur for years already, with created albums under several email accounts.  As much as I have on those services I have even more in my PC that have never been uploaded.  My mistake was spreading it around too much, now it's overwhelming.

I've disabled auto back up from google + and verizon , just more overlapping.  Consolidating is a lot of work, just may have to devote some time to it.  I like dropbox with auto upload and can create albums there too.  

[Lund Explorer]

I feel your pain.  I've been slowly digitizing all of the family albums and the task is overwhelming.  Who knew there could be so many different types of film spread across the decades.

[atcoha]

Tough situation...

Since my first digital camera, I have organized MOST of my photos by year/month. Some have their own folder, xmas 2001 or disney 2001 or something like that if it was an occasion. I still have tons that have been imported from phones over the years...slowly working on those.

I back them up to an external drive, my nas device and I use idrive to back up everything on all devices. 

Had a drive die many years ago, and had not backed them up elsewhere, I was able to retrieve ALL of them. I would cry if I lost the pictures of my kids/family and the memories we made. Yes, it takes time to organize, just keep scratching at it when you have time, sooner or later you will be caught up. You will thank yourself, and so will your family one day.

Good luck.

[Redlinerobert]

I lost a ton of pictures several years back when an online photo storage place went under.   I had pictures of friends that had passed on with no back ups.  I store everything on a portable hard drive.  They're not expensive. 

[FishTank]

I have a ton of pictures.  I have been using adobe bridge and now adobe's cloud.  There are tons of tools and many different ways of setting up files.  

[SirSnookalot]

I lost a ton of pictures several years back when an online photo storage place went under.   I had pictures of friends that had passed on with no back ups.  I store everything on a portable hard drive.  They're not expensive. 

I agree with you, I lost a lot of pictures myself and I did have them backed up, I haven't been able to find those cd's for about 10 years, lol.  I do back up everything on a flash drive.

I started on organization this morning, after 30 minutes I still couldn't plan my attack, lol.  First thing I'll probably do is delete the the photos in my smartphone that aren't really photo worthy or have no real significant value.  As I have albums created in my device deletion and re organization isn't a big deal. As I said my mistake was too many email addresses and too many on line services.

[Lund Explorer]

Tough situation...

Since my first digital camera, I have organized MOST of my photos by year/month. Some have their own folder, xmas 2001 or disney 2001 or something like that if it was an occasion. I still have tons that have been imported from phones over the years...slowly working on those.

I back them up to an external drive, my nas device and I use idrive to back up everything on all devices. 

Had a drive die many years ago, and had not backed them up elsewhere, I was able to retrieve ALL of them. I would cry if I lost the pictures of my kids/family and the memories we made. Yes, it takes time to organize, just keep scratching at it when you have time, sooner or later you will be caught up. You will thank yourself, and so will your family one day.

Good luck.

 

After a year or so of putting off this task, I decided to follow the same organization scheme.  Everything is sorted by year and then by date or event.  The print photos haven't been too bad other than the sheer volume.  My Mother got her first camera in 1937, and Dad started this shutter bug thing in 1940.  The biggest problem came about in 1950 when he bought a 35mm camera and decided to shift over to slides.  There's THOUSANDS of them!

 

Not sure that I found the best way, but I purchased a little thing called a "Pics2SD" scanner that accepts slides, negatives, and actual printed photos.  I've been going through slide file boxes slowly but surely.  Five slides scanned at a time, 20 to fill up the SD Card, and then transferred to the hard drive to be labeled and saved.  Once a year is completed, I burn them onto multiple CD's for all the kids to have copies of their own.  I've also made copies for cousins when I come across old pictures including their families.  On a good day I can complete about 100 slides, if for no other reason than I spend so much time looking at the new additions to this collection rather than keeping to the task at hand. 

 

Right now I'm working on 1956 which was a pretty busy year.  That's the year a grumpy old poster on here showed up with his twin brother, and it seems he was born to parents with a film fetish!

[Bankbeater]

I keep everything on the computer and back it up about once a month.

[papajoe222]

" I wonder why I keep a picture of a 5 pounder laying next to a rod, that's anything but a photo op."

For the same reason I have pics of all my reels inertnals when I first disassembled them. Well maybe not, but I still have them because I'm lazy. It's a lot easier to download them all to my hard drive when the phone's memory gets a little to full than to individually delete or put them in folders.

Besides, If I were doing that I wouldn't be spending my time bonding with a bunch of guys I'll likely never lay eyes on.  I have my priorities.

[scrutch]

I recently recognized this same issue in my own life.  My solution was to begin to load everything into an Apple product called an "Airport Time Capsule".  It IS my internet router, and also a 3GB storage drive.  I can upload all my pics WIRELESSLY from my iOS devices (iPad, iPhone, etc.) and wirelessly from my iMac.  I also have 4 kids (each with an iPad) that I dump the good pictures onto the Airport to keep their iPads from getting too full. This was VERY convenient for me and I am very happy with the results.

[Oregon Native]

I have a couple old photo albums' with all fishing and hunting pics of when family was growing up.  (only thing allowed in) My son told me when it's my time to go that's what he wants the most is those two albums'

[Maxximus Redneckus]

the good old days of 20 Polaroidoids is gone simple was good,,now my wife takes 1000 to 2000 pics on cell and smartphone each day im like holy shyt.

[J Francho]

I use SmugMug.com. I've got over 10,000 pictures uploaded. There is a small yearly charge, but there is a referral program. I have a coupon code for $5 off. If you are interested, send me a PM. I've been with them since 2005, and very satisfied.

[SirSnookalot]

JF, appreciate your input.  I don't have near 10,000 photos, the online "cloud" sites I'm using I'm not really finding any fault with them.  I'm not cold on them I just want to go a different route, why................I really have no significant reason, lol.

Since I have many photos that have never been uploaded, many of the ones that have been uploading are duplicates and some are not, I guess I'm really looking to condense and centralize everything.  I think it may be easier and quicker to d/l my online albums than uploading everything to an online site.  Playing around with this for about a week I do believe what I'm going to do is keep everything in my hard drive (backed up to a flash drive) and use Picasa stand alone desktop.  For future picture posting I'm thinking of attaching the file, not that I've been displeased with using a url.

Using dropbox my photos are automatically d/l to my computer, this has been working well for me.

 

Life was less complicated with a Brownie Hawkye, lol.