Online backup for family photos
IF you’re over a certain age, I’m willing to bet you have one or more boxes of photos in your house. That’s how we backed up our photos back in the day, right? Keep them in a box in the wardrobe.
Well, the really organised people used albums, but even album people have a box of duplicates and outtakes in the back of their wardrobes.
Now we have to find excuses to actually print pictures since today’s pictures most likely live their entire lives digitally.
Digital photos are a big responsibility. I know I can go into my parents’ house and put my hands on their old photos in less than five minutes.
In 20 or 30 years, if your kids come over, where will they find your old digital photos?
We talked recently about backing up your computer’s hard drive. Today we will explore online photo backup services.
The backup integrity is only as strong as the company that owns the service. You need to pick a backup service that will be around in 50 or 100 years.
Storing your photos with Apple, Google or Amazon is a pretty safe bet.
Most everyone takes pictures with their smartphones. I’d bet for most of us, our phone is our main camera.
Both Apple and Android (Google) offer online photo storage to back up your photos.
iPhone users get five gigabytes of free storage when they sign up for an iCloud account. That storage can be used to back up photos from any iOS device or any photos uploaded from your computer.
Extra storage can be purchased. Bumping that storage to 50 gigabytes costs US99c ($NZ1.43) per month; 200 Gb costs $US2.99 per month and 2 terabytes costs $US9.99 per month. The largest two plans can be shared if you have family sharing set up.
Google allows unlimited storage for Android users if they are willing to allow Google to downsize their largest photos.
If users want to store their images at their original resolution, they’ll get the first 15 Gb free, but if they have more to store, they’ll have to pay. A 100Gb plan costs $US1.99 per month, while one terabyte costs $US9.99 per month.
Both Apple and Google offer apps to help upload images from all your devices.
If you are an Amazon Prime subscriber, one of the Prime benefits is free unlimited photo storage. In fact, you can share that unlimited storage with up to five other people in a family group, as long as one of the group is an Amazon Prime subscriber.
Amazon has apps for iOS and Android devices. Windows and Mac users can use the Amazon Desktop App to upload their photos.
Of course, anything you do to back up your photos is better than nothing. Backing up your hard drive, as we discussed last week, or even the copying the photos folder in your home directory to a flash drive and storing it somewhere safe is a good start. — TCA