How Do You Store Your Priceless Pictures?

If your house was on fire and you only had one trip to rush in and rescue one item, what would it be? Most family-minded individuals would choose their photo album because it's irreplaceable. Insurance money can replace most household and personal items, but not photos. It's important to have a backup plan to keep your prized pictures safe from disasters.

Pictures in Photo Albums
Throughout the history of photography, people have kept their favorite pictures in photo albums and stored any extra pictures and film in shoe boxes. Because pictures represent family memories, they are precious, and it's not like you can walk into a store and buy a new photo of your childhood birthday party. If your photos and film melts in a fire, then the most compelling evidence of your life's biggest events will be gone forever. This is why many people will store their film in a fireproof safe or bank vault.

Digital Photography Changes Everything
The advent of digital photography changes everything. While there are still people that will print their digital photos and create photo albums, this activity is now seen as a time-consuming hobby and is not the norm. Instead, modern photographers have digital photo albums that they share on social media. People are also becoming more accustomed to sharing their digital photo albums with each other using their mobile devices, flipping through their pictures by swiping their fingers instead of turning pages.

Digital photography makes photo sharing easy, especially today with high resolution cameras built into smartphones, but digital photography hasn't always been this easy. In the time period between the 90's and social media, digital photography technology evolved from creating poor quality photos on cameras equipped with a floppy disk, to storing your photos on blank CD-ROMs.

Images on Hard Drives
Not every amateur photographer has had the time to go back and upload all of their old digital photos to the Internet. Many people that lived through this time of digital transition have their images stored on the hard drives of old computers. These digital pictures may be the main reason that many old PCs are not thrown away; instead, they are piled up in your basement as you get a new PC every three-to-five years. You know which pictures are on what computer. The beige Gateway 2000 at the bottom of the pile has your wedding pictures. The black Dell with the Nickelback sticker has pictures of your kid's birth, and the old Compaq Presario is all that's left of your Disney World vacation.

These old computers are taking up space in your home, and the pictures on the hard drives are at risk of deteriorating with every passing year. Additionally, in case there was ever a fire, it would be dumb to try and rescue your old photos by grabbing an armful of worthless PCs. The best way to protect and share your old photos is to save them to the cloud. If you're concerned about your old analog pictures, they too can be scanned and stored on the cloud. This way, all of your photos will be safe from fire or any other disaster, and once they are on the cloud, you can organize and edit them however you want, and view and share them on any device from anywhere; and if you feel so inclined, you can even print your pictures and make a photo album, just like back in the good ol' days.

To learn more about backing up your valuable data to the cloud, call Directive at 607.433.2200.