A random question about photos

[sholio]

Based on a discussion elsewhere ... I got to wondering how most people store their digital photos. What do you consider the primary storage for your photos?

Mine are on my computer, although the recent ones are also on my phone, but I would say my main photo archive is the folder where I've been downloading first my digital camera photos and then my phone photos since 2004. Does this make me a hopeless digital Luddite? Let the poll reveal all! (The answer is almost certainly yes. Though I realize DW skews somewhat older by internet standards, so I might be surprised.)

Feel free to tick multiple boxes if you have more than one primary photo storage location or it's changed over time, but I'm mostly curious where you consider the current home of your main photo archive.

Poll #31648

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 90

View Respondents

Where do your photos (mostly) live?

View Answers

Posted to social media; I don't have other copies
1 (1.1%)

On my phone
44 (48.9%)

In some form of cloud storage
42 (46.7%)

In a photo manager program that syncs across devices
9 (10.0%)

On my computer hard drive or an external drive that attaches to it
63 (70.0%)

As physical prints; I don't store them digitally at all
3 (3.3%)

An unholy mix of old phones, defunct social media, sites I can no longer log into, and a million other places such as God and nature never intended
12 (13.3%)

I don't know/I don't take photos/I cannot be photographed because the camera will steal my soul
5 (5.6%)

You failed to mention an important one I will mention in the comments!
2 (2.2%)

Comments

[rheanna]

I have a real mishmash of stuff, with only the most recent years being reasonably organised. For me, everything up to my early 20s is a physical print, and after that there's a few very spotty years where I know I was taking digital photos but the files were lost or deleted long ago. For a couple of years around the time our daughter was born, husband and I used Amazon photos, which worked really well for us... until they changed how it worked and overnight it became almost completely unusable. At that point we shifted to the Apple ecosystem, so all our photos are backed up to iCloud and we have a shared 'family vault' which the grandparents have access to as well where we add any particularly good or memorable family snaps. My husband owns a fairly expensive digital camera which he's about to sell because it never gets used; it's too big and bulky to lug around on family trips and days out, and phone cameras are so much handier that we just use those all the time.

Around 2020, I gave myself the task of going through and consolidating my old digital photo archives, and I used one of those online services to make a giant photo book which starts with a photo of me standing in my parents' garden in the late 1990s and ends in 2018 with the birth of my daughter. Since then I've been trying to make a physical photo book for each year, although I am almost always about 2 years behind.

[ckd]

Locally stored on a NAS box that's replicating to another one on the opposite side of the country.

[trobadora]

Same as you, I consider the folder on my hard drive to be the main place. Though I do also have old photos that only exist as prints, in some drawer somewhere, and there's my parents' slide collection which I consider mine by extension.

ETA: Btw, happy birthday! ♥

[passingbuzzards]

Is "photo manager program that syncs across devices" not just a form of cloud storage? Main place for me is definitely just Apple's default Photos synced between iCloud/iPhone/Mac.

[anna_wing]

I have a lot on CD-ROMs. The rest are on assorted phones of varying degrees of extinction, and my current laptop. At some point, possibly in my retirement, I will have to try to retrieve them, and possibly actually print them out in hardcopy.

[harpers_child]

If you can get to the CD-ROMs sooner, you should. They're very prone to digital rot. My parents have lost chunks of events because the CDs were degraded/ damaged ten years later.

[anna_wing]

Thanks! Good point, I'll go and dig them out.

[ivyfic]

I have since the inception of digital photography kept all my digital photos from all sources in a folder on my hard drive organized in folders by date. When I got an iPhone, I just added the task of downloading and filing the images every few months. My wife set up mirroring to the cloud for me which meant negotiating around my mental model that this folder of images are the negatives. I wouldn’t let her de duplicate the files. She gave up trying.

[yalumesse]

My laptop harddrive, in a folder, backed up to an external harddrive montly: Every digital photo I have from before getting a phone is there by default, and while I only take photos on my phone nowadays, any worth keeping get transferred to my laptop every few months, then deleted from the phone - I hate having duplicates and not knowing whether something is 'safe' in the proper place or not.

The laptop folder has several subfolders (family pics, friend pics, pets, events, etc), several of which have subfolders of their own by date or whateve is suitable for the topic.

I do have a fair number of phyiscal photos from my childhood, the best or most important of which have been scanned in at some point. My parents have boxes more that I'll probably never scan. I refuse to have anything in the cloud.

[cairistiona]

I'm currently going through all the physical photos I own, including masses inherited when my parents passed away. I'm scanning them into digital with an Epson photo scanner, tossing most of the hard copies but keeping the best ones--and the truly antique ones--in photo-safe albums and boxes. The digitized photos are scanned to an external hard drive that's also backed up to the cloud (Amazon right now, because iDrive is trash and stopped working and nothing we've done can convince it to resume :P). I thought I'd get through the whole scanning project in a few months but... it's taking a lot longer because it's tedious (and a little emotionally draining at times, tbh).

Digital photos live on my phone and laptop, plus Google photos and Amazon Photos.

[sheron]

On my harddrive but then backed up across various media. I don't trust Cloud at all XD
I'm vaguelly thinking about printing some more to put around my place in physical form

[wateroverstone]

I have several shoe boxes full of photos taken in the 90s with my little Olympus 35mm. I had this camera when I met my husband and it didn't die until I had my second child in 1996 so the photos are precious.After this I went digital with the photos backed up on CDs (still in a drawer, in case) and then an external memory. Son has now decided all photos must be backed up on his cloud storage and instructed my computer to do this. This is lucky as a virus has meant I've had to reinstall Windows so I'll need to recover all my photos (many thousands) from him as I only got the option of saving documents rather than photos and documents this reinstall.
Mainly what I do with photos is print a few out of things I've done- parties, nice walks etc then scrapbook them so I can look through and see what I've been up to over a year.

[leesa_perrie]

I try to copy the ones on my phone onto the computer, where I keep all my digital photos. We have two external hard drives that we back up onto, around once or twice a week, and I've also been known to back up to flashdrives too!!

But then, my hubby was an IT guy. He knows the importance of back ups, and the dangers of 'ransom hackers', hence two hard drives! Only one is allowed to be connected to the computer at a time, so if we got ransom hacked, we'd have a fairly recent back up and can tell them to go away! (Highly unlikely, but better safe than sorry I guess!)

He doesn't trust cloud storage all that much either.

[pauraque]

I have recently learned that my boss's answer to this question is that she has been keeping all her personal photos on the Google drive we are supposed to use for internal staff documents, which of course is now full.

[chomiji]

When I was using various digital cameras, I kept up a Flickr site. When I got a camera with what was then a better camera (not better than my digital SLRs, but better than my previous phone), I stopped that because the phone pictures looked like shit compared to my digital SLR photos. So now they are mostly on my phone or my phone-based social media accounts.

I don't want FB/META running rampant on my main computer, so it's a bit of a process getting photos over here to upload on DW. Mostly I end up emailing them. I do have a Google drive set up to handle things over 1 or 2 files, if I really want to deal with it. Permissions get so funky, though.

[amalthia]

Google Photos and I save my photos from there to my hard drive periodically.

[harpers_child]

This reminds me I need to do a phone backup and am overdue for backing up my computer in general to the external.

Phone -> poorly organized folders on my desktop -> those same folders copied over to the external. I'm trying to be better about printing stuff out, but the executive function isn't functioning.

[sophia_sol]

I have them all carefully stored and organized in files on my computer, all backed up to the cloud with the rest of my digital data for safety. I also have printed off photo books, one book per 2-3 years of my archive, to preserve a physical record of the things that were most important to me from that time! I like redundancy where possible, because anything can happen and then it's all gone, if it's only in one place.

[ellenmillion]

MOST of mine are digital now, but I have a whole lot of old non-digitized photos in various boxes and albums!

[cornerofmadness]

my current phone can't be saved to my computer/external drive which is my preference. I can only send it to the cloud or social media which annoys me so much I rarely use it to take photos

[viridian5]

My computer hard drive, zip drives, my phone, and a few different storage web sites for (my many, many) digital photos and some photo albums, a big photo box, some envelopes, and a Ziplock bag or two for physical prints.

[yhlee]

Minority opinion: Honestly it's a mish-mash of several options, but at this point, you could delete all my photos and I would only care about like 1% of them if that. Like, my iPhone is 95% catten pics by volumes and you know, she really only has like four poses lol and I am the kind of shitty photographer who has telephone poles growing out of people's heads. (My dad was a very good amateur before he shrug emoji gave it up because someone stole his old-fashioned SLR and he wasn't particularly motivated to get another nice camera; one of my uncles is a professional photographer.) My memories aren't visual to begin with; it's not really a loss.

Edit: not to say it's wrong or bad for other people to really care about their photos! I'm definitely aware that this is a very deep minority, and I like photography a lot as an art/technical skill from watching my dad do it. But I don't have any particular passion for it, and I'm deeply indifferent to my own photos after they've served their usually transient purpose (cat pic on social media, photo reference for art).

[sally_maria]

I have physical pictures from back in the day, and old digital pictures taken with a camera sorted by date on my hard drive, but for the last 6 years or so my phone automatically backs up all the pictures I take, download or screenshot to the cloud. But I still want a physical backup, so I sync it to my hard drive, and then back that up every so often.

I probably should go through and tidy it up, I'm sure I don't need all of them, but that's a one of these days project.