Guest Posts

Securely Store your Photos Forever

From birthday parties to wedding celebrations, there are so many momentous occasions in our lives that we hope to treasure forever. Photos allow us to do this, capturing and preserving moments in time that we can re-live, reminisce about and reflect on. But, do photos last forever? Vulnerable to dust, light exposure, heat, and water, for physical photos, the answer is unfortunately no. So then, what is the answer?

Read on to discover the steps you should take in order to make these priceless mementoes live eternally.

Go Digital

Thanks to technological advancements, the world of photography has changed drastically over the years, including how photos get stored. Say goodbye to photo albums that get hidden away, photo frames that collect dust and smudged, yellowing images with diminished value. Instead, opt for cloud computing storage, which allows you to digitally access your photos from anywhere in the world, as long as you have an internet connection. While there are many commercial cloud storage providers on the market, for a purely carefree experience, choose a specialised high-security system such as Your Digital File ( www.yourdigitalfile.com/). After all, you don’t want your invaluable and personal images being stolen or lost to the Internet.

Organisation

Another way to ensure that your photos are tracked and easily accessed is to organise them appropriately. Creating clearly marked and logically named folders, including a breakdown of year and month, will eliminate confusion and wasted time. Then make subfolders that cover different aspects of your life such as Day-to-day, Birthdays and Holidays. When uploading the photos, take the time to scrutinise each image; do you really need to store this photo? Does it make the cut? Use this opportunity to weed out low-quality or superfluous photos.

Limited Access

Whether you decide to stick with old-fashioned albums, or upgrade to a cloud computing system, by limiting access to your photos, you will ensure that you have full control of them. This means that they are more likely to stay organised and intact. Stains and sticky fingers, as well as deleted and moved images, can present real headaches, especially if the photos are highly precious and irreplaceable. Fitting back into your wedding dress or suit and re-creating that special day sounds like a lot of effort, doesn’t it?

Digital Mediums to Avoid

Cloud computing is a recommended option for storage, but what other popular possibilities should you avoid and why? Many people still believe burning your images to a CD is the best way to go, but this is not the case, especially if you are deleting those pictures afterwards to create more space. CDs are physical objects that are fragile. They can be scratched, warped, broken or inexplicably just stop working. The same can be said of external hard drives and USBs. Forgetting to safely remove your external device from your computer can create absolute havoc, which no one wants to deal with!

How do you look after your photos? Do you have tips to share with other readers? Comment below to share your thoughts.

photo courtesy of martinak15