When I go to visit my grandfather, I often enjoy looking at our family photo album. He was born in the 1930s in the Soviet Union and the pictures start sometime in the 1950s, when he married my grandmother, and go all the way up to today.
That photo album survived 40 years in communism, three apartments, a trans-Atlantic move to the United States, and two moves in Philadelphia. There are maybe 300 pictures in the album, and every single one of them is interesting.
If I want to look at the pictures, all I have to do is open the album.
Whereas, if I want to make sure the current pictures I’m taking of my five-month-old daugher last, I do the following:
Take picture with Android phone that syncs automatically with what is now Google Photos.
Since Google has the propensity to shutter products like my beloved Google Reader, I don’t trust it with Google Photos (which used to be G+, which used to be Picasa before that,) either.
So, every couple of months, I download the photos in bulk via Google Takeout, only, as a recent post pointed out, it’s a huge PITA - NSFW language. I managed to somehow download everything in my account when I was on a nesting spree when I was pregnant; I haven’t done so since.
Upload the downloads to an Amazon Glacier bucket through Arq for cold storage. Only, my Arq license expired and costs $35, so I haven’t done that yet, either.
Download to 1TB external hard drive. Ostensibly all of my downloads up to January are now safe in four redundant locations. Paranoid much? Yes, but this happened before, so I don’t trust anything anymore.
I’m done. Phew. But oh! What if I actually want these pictures to last more than 10 years? I need to print them out, and make copies for grandparents. So I download only the specific ones I want from Google Photos (takes too long to look through my hard drive), upload to Snapfish, and then print.
I have over 2,000 pictures of my baby, but how many photos will I still have in 10 years? In 20 years? And how many good ones?
I wish I knew an easier way to save and workflow through pictures, but I scoured all the forums, both tech-related and parenting-related, and haven’t found an answer besides, “in the cloud.”
Meanwhile, the pictures from my grandaprents’ wedding in the early 1950s are still in the album, as fresh and accessible as ever.