What to Do with All Our Digital Photos!

Updated on November 09, 2011
N.R. asks from Chicago, IL
13 answers

Help, moms! We have 7 years of photos on the little cards that go in our digital camera. I do not know exactly how to burn them onto CDs or whatever I have to do and am petrified that we are going to lose them somehow. I'm sure it's not as complicated as I'm making it, but since I don't know exactly how to forge ahead, I'm not. Please give me some advice to get this under control and safely backed up so I can stop losing sleep over it. So appreciate your help!

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So What Happened?

Thanks everyone for the great ideas. They've inspired me to get going, save the photos multiple places, and have peace of mind!

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J.G.

answers from Rockford on

I used to use photobucket.com now I use Kodakgallery.com. I upload all of mine to the online albums, so that if I lose the cards or my flash drives (which I also have then on) or if my computer crashes I will still be able to access or print all my photos. Gives me some piece of mind knowing that if anything happens I will still be able to have all my memories.

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S.K.

answers from Minneapolis on

Do you mean to say you have not downloaded any of those pictures you have taken last 7 years?? I download pics every couple days, I want see the pics immediately and also save them carefully.

Since you have lot of photos, I would say first create a folder on your computer for all your pictures and within that folder , create mutiple subfolders for each year (in your case 7 sub folders and rename each of them with the year). Download all the pics and organize them based on the year they were clicked. Now go through each folder one by one and sort all the pics.Delete the ones that are blurred etc. If it were M. , I would create few more subfolders for each year based on the event.

Now once you have everything sorted out and organised based on year/vacation/event etc - half your job is done!

Next step is to back up these photos because your computer might crash and you might lose all your them.
1. Buy a external hard drive. You can plug this into your computer using the USB port. Copy your main folder (the one that has all the sub folders for each year) to the hard drive. Now you will have a back up of all your pics.
2. The hard drive can crash too. So I would also back up pictures online. There are many photo-sharing websites you can create an account with and upload all your pictures.If you have too many photos, then sort through them again and upload the ones you love. You can also easily share these online albums with your friends and family.
3. All the pictures that you absolutely love , get them printed! Costco works out great for bulk printing and photo quality is good too. Buy 7 photo albums and save these prints for each year.
4. if you want to be more creative and have some more time in your hands, you can create scrapbooks (manual or digital). For online scrapbooks/photo albums - check shutterfly.com , walgreens,com

If you haven't downloaded your pics for 7 years , I would say forget about being creative for now. Download, Sort and organize, Backup and then get prints!

3 moms found this helpful
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K.P.

answers from New York on

You can easily download them onto your home computer. Find the camera's manual and read the directions! Ours is just a matter of plugging the memory card into the printer, but others have a cord that connects the camera to the computer.

You could also just take them to CVS and use their self-service kiosks. Put the card in the machine and select "Make a CD"!

1 mom found this helpful

B.S.

answers from Lansing on

Mine are a little bit of everywhere. I upload them to a photo site to print them...so most are stored there. Then I have some stored on my actually computer as well as my husbands PS3. But I also backup ALL pictures onto an external hard drive. On the hard drive I have all the pictures saved in file folders by year and month.

1 mom found this helpful
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✩.!.

answers from Los Angeles on

Alot of the sites mentioned below will also give discounts for printing in large quantaties.

I 2nd storing on one of the below websites as well as getting the device Momma L suggested. My SIL has one and we share it between the whole family as a 2nd backup.

You can also create albums with the below websites as well.

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V.G.

answers from Chicago on

Use an external card reader, that will connect to your Compuet USB port and then you can organize. We also create a Second back up (every month) - just to be safe!

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J.M.

answers from Chicago on

We put them on a memory stick.

M.L.

answers from Houston on

First, you can upload them to a photo hosting site like snapfish or smilebox. That will give you a secondary backup.

We also have a separate hard drive we store photos on, no clue what it's called, go to Best Buy and ask about it. Ours was about $50. It's small, you just plug it into your computer and drop the saved photo files in the hard drive file.

My sister lost a few years of photos due to her computer crashing, she was sooo sad. Fortunately, a lot of the favorites had been saved to snapfish or loaded to facebook so she still had online copies.

To upload them in your computer, it's very easy! You can insert the card into your computer and save them to your photo file. Your camera and computer should have manuals how to do this. If not, google it and you will find lots of instructions.

C.P.

answers from Columbia on

I suggest that you use an external hard drive to store your photos. You can load them onto your computer and then transfer them to the hard drive very easily, just highlight, drag and drop. An external hard drive like this one is affordable and will take at LEAST another 7 years to fill up with photos. ;o) http://www.amazon.com/Western-Digital-Elements-Desktop-Ex...

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M.D.

answers from Chicago on

i have folders set up on my computer, organized by year and then seasons or events (ie: 2011 Summer, or 2011 D's 5th birthday) etc
Once uploaded to the computer, I also upload to Shutterfly.com, I have albums set up the same way and on here you can set them up so others can view them, so all my albums can be seen by family and friends from all over the world......

J.P.

answers from Lakeland on

You can burn them to a cd, get a memory stick or just leave them on the memory card. I would go with the one that takes up the least amout of space.

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M.P.

answers from Peoria on

I have an external hard drive that backs up our comp every night. I've been burned twice already. I have them organized in folders on the hard drive but after one scare, I uploaded all of them onto kodakgallery.com. it will be time consuming but it is so worth the peace of mind. Plus, once you are done, you can reuse your memory sticks and just maintain from there.

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C.C.

answers from Chicago on

I use shutterfly to upload pictures and share with others. I have used this site to create books of pictures for family anniversaries and milestone birthdays. They will keep your pictures indefinitely and offer you a website to share your pictures with family.

I upload pictures to my mac computer and back them up with an external drive connected to my mac that runs periodically to make copies of the files on my mac.
My sister in law likes Picasso for organizing the pictures on her computer.

You have a great question because smart phones collect pictures along with digital camers and the pictures emailed to you and the ones you see and want to keep from facebook...

I used to take pictures, print them and put them into albums for each child but with the digital format, its easier to just review what's on the computer to respond to requests for the baby picture etc.

We purchased a scanner to be able to take the oldest family pictures and move them onto computer.

I purchased a memory stick to get a copy of son and daughter-in-law's pictures from their honeymoon directly from their laptop when they returned and gave us slide show from their trip.

I also have many boxes of pictures at my house but I find, over time, that I don't look in them unless I have a special project.

My kids have loved to look at their albums. It is soothing to a cranky kid to say "let's look at your pictures from when you were little..."

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