If you’re a photography enthusiast who uses the phone or better still, a DSLR to click photographs, a pain point we have in common is the amount of data we generate. We are pretty sure you have thousands and thousands of photos and videos, stuffed all over the place, some in our phones, others on our laptop or PC. While part of the issue is the scattered content, the bigger concern ought to be – what do we do if we lose all the photos we’ve captured painstakingly over the years, even decade, or more. Unfortunately, there is little you can do about losing data. Recovering photos is too difficult, expensive and sometimes, impossible. Fortunately, there are thindgs you can do to stop from losing photos. We offer you a couple of methods to prevent losing photos, by offering some ways backing up your photos, and also organizing them better.
Resizing photos and organizing them
Before you start backing up your photos to the web, now might be a good idea to resize photos. One of the biggest hurdles you might face is the availability of storage space offered by your host, and also the time it takes to upload all the photos at the maximum resolution to the internet. Photos shot on a DSLR for example, can take anywhere between 8 to 15MB each. You may be looking at anywhere between 10 and 500GB of photos, maybe more. It’s a good idea to resize the photos to a size that’s easy to upload but can also be viewed on large screens in the future, or even printed.
If you’re not using any professional photo editing software, you can use IrfanView. It’s a free software that has a batch conversion feature that lets you select folders, resize photos, compress them, adjust quality, even add effects in just a few clicks. Start by downloading and installing IrfanView from www.irfanview.com. 
Open IrfanView, click on File > Batch Conversion/Rename. Choose the folders and photos you wish to compress by selecting the folders, then selecting Add. Click on ‘Use advanced options (for bulk resize…)’ checkbox, then click on Advanced. Check the Resize checkbox on the left, then click the ‘Set long side to’, and choose a resolution. This forces IrfanView to resize the photos to a certain size. This is important, because resizing the photos brings down the file size drastically. In most cases, a length of the image set at 3000 to 4000 pixels is perfect. A length of around 4000 pixels will ensure that you can use this image on a 4K TV in the future. Quality settings can be reduced to 90 per cent too. If you’re only going to be using these photos on laptops or mobile phones, image resolutions can be set to be lower. 
Don’t forget to check the box for Create subfolders in destination folder, then click OK. This will make a replica of your folder structure from your source folder to the destination folder. Make sure you also set a Destination folder, different from the source folder. Click on Start Batch.
Uploading photos to Flickr
Flickr offers 1TB of free storage for storing photos, and this is enough for pretty much all the photos you’ve ever clicked. This is one reason for recommending Flickr. It also happens to be a lot simpler for organizing photos, than using file managers or photo editors on laptops and PCs. Browsing through gigabytes of photos can be annoying and sorting them, moving them into folders takes a lot of time. Flickr makes it effortless.
If you’re planning on backing up photos offline, you can also use IrfanView or Windows Explorer to sort photos but do so after first setting the thumbnail preview size to be large. This way you don’t need to open every photo before selecting it and moving them. You can simply drag and drop thumbnails into folders.If you aren’t keen on Flickr, there are other online backup options to choose from, such as Google Drive, Google Photos and Smugmug. More professional but general data backup options include services such as Backblaze and Crashplan. They don’t offer you the social element photo hosting services have. These are more relevant if you plan on using the storage for not just photos, but also documents, spreadsheets and more.
If you’re hosting photos on Flickr, remember to keep them private. When you upload photos, don’t forget to set the visibility permissions to yourself only, and set them to be not searchable. This can be done at the time of uploading, or using the Organizer feature, after you are done uploading.
Storing data offline
One of the other secure ways of storing photos is using physical drives. It’s an old method but portable hard drives and pen drives are more affordable than ever before, even more secure in some cases. It’s a good idea to make a copy of your photos in them, even if you have already backed them up online. Try not to use the drive actively, instead keep it stored securely. Storing data here is much simpler, and you can even retrieve your data immediately without an internet connection.
Make sure you sort and keep the photos in neat folders before you move them to your drive. If you don’t have a lot of data to backup, make copies of your data on a couple of drives, in case one of them stops working.
Do you have any suggestions on how to store and organize photos better? Let us know through the comments section below.
