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“I’m running out of storage on my phone. What do I do?”
Deleting unwanted photos will only get you so far. You will eventually run out of space again and you are left with the conundrum of which photos get the ax. We get this question all the time and when a follower wrote in over the weekend asking about this issue, I thought it would be the perfect time to dedicate a post to digital storage.
I’m guessing that this is something we deal with a little more than most since we are constantly in the process of documenting life. Our average month generally contains a thousand plus images / videos and if we are on vacation, that number can easily quadruple. So what do we do with all of those digital files that need storing? Our current process looks like this…
- Every month and prior to a trip, we plug our phones into our computer and upload every single file to a folder on our desktop until we have time to sort through them.
- Those original files then get sorted into “events” and “months” folders. I examine each file for date / content and group them accordingly. For example, in January, we may have celebrated with family (I title a folder “01 – New Years”), went on vacation (“01 – Cruise”), and had lots of little moments that don’t necessarily need grouped, so they go in their own generic month folder (“01 – January”).
- This is probably where our paths diverge (feel free to skip to number 4), but from there, I pull those folders individually into our editing software. I take the time to go through each image, pick out our favorites, edit, and then save those edits to the same folder – the highlights, if you will, that make it in to our end of year projects and on our walls.
- We now have images organized in folders on our desktop and have the highlights in their own “edits” folder within the folder. At this point, each folder from the desktop makes it to our external hard drive. Our external drive already has folders marked by year, so we drag each folder to its corresponding year and everything is now categorized, edited, and organized by month, event, and year.
I’ve linked to two drives below. Both sit on our desk and hold our lives documented. The larger is for long term storage while the smaller regularly travels with us on big trips.
Each one of the pieces of equipment below have failed on us at one point or another. Having learned the hard way, we are offering you our suggestions of how to safeguard your files in case of failure.
- Cameras – We never travel with just one anymore. One of our biggest regrets is a video camera that died in Paris and left us without any video of the entire trip (pre-smart phones). It haunts us to this day – the memories we weren’t able to capture. On any given trip, we now always have some sort of backup camera so that the entire trip is not lost.
- Memory cards – We back up our cards often. Monthly if it’s just normal life, nightly if we are on a big trip. We always travel with a portable hard drive so we don’t lose our day’s memories. This actually happened to us when we were in Thailand and we were so thankful that we had backed up everything the night before. We also like to invest in SLR cameras that have a dual memory slot option so that we are covered.
- Computers – More than once, we have asked my exceptionally astute brother to save our files on a failed computer. Thankfully, he has been able to every time, but knowing we have everything in more than one place keeps that worry at bay.
- Hard drives – We had our most expensive ever, completely-impossible-to-fail business hard drive fail. Thankfully, we had all of our business files backed up in another location. Have more than one backup! We always try to make sure our images (especially the important ones like adoption stories and big trips) are in more than one location. One thing that we haven’t gotten into yet is online photo storage because in the past, it meant having a monthly payment in our budget. That being said, I’ve heard really great things about some free options out there like Google and Amazon, but haven’t spent much time researching this. The problem with these types of services is that often companies will start out with a free option and then make the switch to having paid plans when they want to monetize or when you run out of “free” space. We will most likely head to the online backup route in the future, but only in addition to our physical drives.
I hope this helps in the area of all of your digital clutter. This is our process, although I know there are tons of other options out there that are available to you. What are your favorite options for storage? We’d love to hear from you on what works for you, and bonus points if it’s free.
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