HowWhere Do You Store Your Vacation Pictures?

I print about 200 pictures (for a weeklong trip) and put them in a regular album. The rest of them I put on an external hard drive, then delete most of them from my regular computer. You can buy huge external drives for not a lot of money. I share my pictures with friends and family through Picasaweb, but I don't know if those albums expire after a time or not.

Hi Carroll,

I just returned from France too! :)

I am going through my pictures now on Shutterfly.com It's pretty user friendly and I will be ordering prints. You can also make a photo album on this site. I have also used Kodak.com in that past for the same thing.

You don't have to pay to store anything on these sites, but with Kodak you do have to make a minimum purchase (I think $10 per two years) to keep the photos active. Both sites allow you to invite others to view your photos online.

Have fun reliving those memories. :)

Hi Carroll,

We use www.worldisround.com for our pic's. It's free to use.

Paul

Carroll,

At the moment the majority of my vacation photos are stored on the hard drive and backup drive of my computer. Some of the recent trips have also been archived on DVD's. I'm planning on buying a large capacity RAID drive in the near future, primarily for photo storage.

I also found that photos used too much of the hard drive capacity on my Laptop (which originally only had a 160 GB HD installed - that's now been upgraded to 250 GB).

I also have a lot of my vacation photos stored at www.smugmug.com which I started primarily so that I could share photos with other members of the tour groups as well as family and friends. The cost for a basic package was only about $40 a year, and it offers unlimited storage (which is a real benefit for those of us with dSLR's that produce large file sizes).

I hope to one day get my photos all sorted nicely on the large capacity drives, but that will have to be a retirement project.

Cheers!

I store my photos on my hard drive and a back-up on the external hard drive. I have also burned CD's and DVD's over the years as archives, just in case. I share photos online at www.pbase.com The photos I have online are low resolution, not the original size.

I maintain a travel journal and upload a small collection to it each day while I am away. For local starage, I do much like Chris. I have a large external harddrive with all my photos on it and have DVDs which I store each year. I have made some DVDs (to play on a DVD player with music) and planned to make more, as Ken suggests, as a retirement project. I am now retired - if only I had the time!

I make a disk or two of my pictures to give to family and to keep as a backup.

Mostly I put them in My Pictures folder of my computers and set up my screen saver as a slide show of My Pictures. That way I see them all the time.

I email one or two to friends or put into Christmas letters to family and friends.

I'm surprised how rarely I actually print a picture at home. I have yet to take one to a photo store to have it printed nicely.

One of the nice ways to show off your photos is with a digital picture frame. You can buy extra chips for these and put quite a few photos on it. We turn this on when we have parties and get-togethers and it becomes a nice ice-breaker, especially if we have people who don't know each other. The photos can be adjusted to the speed you want them to change, so you don't get a boring slide show. I saw this at one of my friends' houses for a Christmas party and it brought out great travel conversations.

We also did this for our parents, who can no longer travel, so that they could view our trips. My mom used hers so much she burned the frame out!

So, make a few chips, or download your photos onto CD's then make a new chip every once in a while with a variety of photos.

I print a very small percentage of mine and like Brad have set my screensaver to a slideshow. With over 20,000 photos on my computer I bought a 1 TB external hard drive to give additional space and as a backup to my PC hard drive. I also back up my computer files to include photos with an outside source, Carbonite. Carbonite charges a little less than $5 per month for this service. I once had an external hard drive that crashed so I do not have full confidence in just backing up my files and photos with my own equipment. I also back up with DVD's. I upload some of my photos to the Picasa Website which is free and friends can view if they want.

We store ours online on Webshots. You can make the albums private or public. I made mine private and allow certain people to view them. I believe it is only $20/yr. They have a very nice full screen slide show.

http://www.webshots.com/

We also keep them on our hard drive and a back-up on an Iomega portable HD.

I label each picture on the HD prior to uploading on Webshots.

While I too use methods mentioned above, I want to mention that in the long run, say 25 or more years down the line, the only photos you may have left will be the ones you printed out (using an archival-quality print method), or those photos you've taken the time to keep updated as digital photo formats change.

A lot of photos used to stored in TIFF or other formats. Now a lot of software can't even read TIFF files. Who knows how much longer JPG will be the standard format? For years, of course, but decades? I doubt it.

Many external hard disks store data in compressed format. Years down the line you may no longer have the software to decompress the files so you can read them, or future hardware may not even read hard disks from 15 years ago.

All hard disks eventually crash or get thrown away. Who knows how much longer equipment will accept CDs? Have you tried to access data on an old floppy disk lately? Good luck finding a disk drive to put them in.

Thanks so much for all the great suggestions. I knew I'd get great advice here. I plan to start playing around with my pictures this weekend. Thanks again!

Along with hard drive and back up, I make discs as well, print a few to frame, and I also use Picasa...wonderful way to crop, enhance, make collages, add comments or text. Lots of storage for FREE.