Storing digital photos - How do you store all your photos?

[leoleosuperstar]

I was storing them on our laptop and kept getting an error report and had to restart the computer. I have the photos and iTunes stores on a back up system but the laptop works a lot better without them.
Are their any alternatives?
In an ideal world I am hoping to get a separate memory system.

I had the same problem and the solution is unfortunately to throw money at it. I bought a massive 500gb external drive for £60.50, which solved the problem www.dabs.com/products/samsung-500gb-2-5--drive--red--terminator-salvation-pre-loaded-69VM.html. It's capacity is vast, so it holds a ton of other files on it as well.

Sounds perfect - I'll go have a look.
Thank you.

I keep my photos on my laptop and iPhoto is set up to access them. I delete old ones periodically to free up space.

I back my laptop up every few weeks (things don't change that often) to an external hard disk drive. Each back up is kept until the disk is out of room when I delete the oldest.

I also explicitly back up the photos to an external hard disk drive where they are kept forever.

Finally I back up the photos from the external drive to a CD once I have enough to fill one.

You say that "the laptop works a lot better without them", what do you mean?

Is iPhoto accessing photos stored on an external disk?

How do I use it? Will it just show up as an additional drive and I save my files there? Final question - do I back it up like normal?

I think the lap top is a lot faster without all the photos and iTunes on it.
I do not access the photos using my iphone.
What sort of CD's do you store your photos on and can you veiw them on a DVD player or just a computer?

buy an extra drive. it does just show up as an extra drive, so instead of saving things to c:.... you save them to f:..... whatever. so easy. £60 well spent says dh. and speeds up everyhting else you do.

Sorry, I meant have you set up iPhoto to access the photos from an external disk? Which is something that you can do but will slow it down a touch.

I just burn them to regular CD-ROMS, I've never tried them in a DVD player though some might handle them. I do it more as a backup to my backups than as something that I would access them with.

External Disks should just show up on a Mac both in Finder and on your Desktop, so you can easily drag files to it.

If you keep anything in only one place then you should be backing that place up.

So if you keep some photos on that external hard disk and not on your laptop then back that external disk up to something else.

I copy mine to an external hard drive, and am slowly in process of putting them on cd as well. As soon as I have them on HDrive and CD I will delete them from my computer.

HDrives and CDs could fail, so I have them stored in both locations, just in case. The CDs I have done so far are kept at work so if there was a fire and my hard drive was damaged the CDs should be safe.

I would have to kill myself if I ever lost my digital photos so here is what I do:

all stored on external hard drive plugged into main desktop.

However, because it vulnerable as it is always plugged in, I back up onto a 32GB memory stick. I also have all photos stored onto my ipod which then acts as another back up.

Paranoid? Me?