to have years of photos in chaos

[photochaos]

Any suggestions for organisation of many thousands of photos over many years and taken across 3 or 4 devices and currently on numerous hard drives in fire proof safe but totally disorganized. Cloud storage? I have never used the cloud? Any other options? Are there any that offer best easy photo organization? Anyone managed to organize a huge back log? Thanks

Well hello there twin! Defo want someone to come up with a solution for this!!!

Haven't done it yet but I'm planning to move all my photos to Amazon - I did some quick research and that seemed the best value for photo storage. My pics are currently spread across multiple cloud storage services (Google photos, iCloud and Flickr - I thought the latter would be the best solution but it's just too expensive to keep up).

My plan is to divide it into manageable chunks and take it slowly, starting with further back periods of time and working forwards. Also using tags as much as possible to help find them in the future. Remove duplicates as you go - be brutal.

I will add Flickr does seem to be the best for organising, as you can use lots of different tags and albums. But I've always found it very slow and at €8 a month it's just not worth it for me. But it might be good for you.

Thank you. Someone else had mentioned amazon but they would not be a company i would normally use. Is it only good value if you have amazon prime too as i wouldnt shop there and would really prefer someone else? However I guess preventing the loss of all my photos for future generations may be more important than my principles!

A friend of mine scanned all her old photos and also picked the best of her digital photos and had photo books printed which I thought was a really lovely idea. Looking through my old photos, some are really precious but there’s a lot of junk there too. The digital ones are the same. I’d love to go through them bit by bit and print out the photo books then save the data on CDs and in the cloud. I use Google photos at the moment.

First I would ruthlessly weed out the duds and duplicates.
Then mine are copied onto hardrives and google storage.

It's old fashioned but print some? prints last forever and get looked at.

I have family prints from late 19th century.
Albums made by my mother that feature her grandparents and a whole lot of family history.
I used to print all the photos of DC in the 90s before digital. Then I switched to digital but still print a small selection for every year.

Google photos is great, especially if you pay for the first tier. 1 have over 1tb of photos, it makes viewing them so easy. You can search by faces, objects, places (even beach, party etc)

I have mine saved on DropBox - I also scan all the paper bills etc that come in and save them on there so it's a general catchall and you can set it up so that when you connect your devices to the laptop/PC it autosyncs..... they are all there just waiting for me to rename and file as needed...

Dropbox app also has a scanning tool so any interesting articles etc can be scanned and saved.

I pay £9.99 for 1TB but it has absolutely everything for the family plus all my materials from my BSc, MRes and MBA too so basically my life 😀

It's handy for sharing documents etc too as you just create a folder and share that

I don't think you need to have Prime. I think this is Amazon Web Services rather than the retail side.

Would dropbox or amazon have better system for cataloging and retrieval? Any other options. Thanks

Honestly I think the best solution depends largely on what your main devices are. Are you an android/apple household? What do you use for computers?

Posted too early.

If you're primarily an apple household, iCloud photos would be the most convenient, same with google photos for android users or if you're someone who's heavily integrated into the google ecosystem i.e. gmail, google docs etc.

The downside to amazon photos is that you only get about 5gb of storage for videos even if you purchase storage for photos. The app (on iPhone at least) is also not the best and there are some syncing issues when I tried it out. There's also the other thing where your photo locations aren't displayed automatically on the map (if you've turned location settings on) the way it does for iCloud and google photos.

Dropbox is a bit like one drive in that it's not so much a photo storage thing as a file storage one. You can store photos in it, of course, but it doesn't have some specific photo-searching functionality like there is in iCloud or google photos i.e. you'd can't type 'dog' and have all your dog pictures (as determined by the AI) show up.

I need to do this too desperately. However, I’ve got photos on old laptops’ hard drives. Does anyone know if I can take them anywhere to get the photos taken off?

I use amazon which is good for tags and dates.

Whilst going through some photos I found a set of 254 that my son had taken on 1 train journey 🤣

Photo admin is a real thing 🤣

I like the book idea too

Thank you. Very helpful but am no clearer now. Am on android so icloud is out. Dropbox doesnt sound ideal if you cant search the photos and amazon doesnt sound ideal as i have loads of video clips. Is anyone best for video clips?

Amazon works if you pay for the higher tiered storage plans.

www.amazon.co.uk/b?ie=UTF8&node=12153286031 Storage and prices are right at the bottom.

Google works too as you're on android as it works natively on your phone so no need to download any additional apps or anything like that.

one.google.com/about/plans That's the one.