How to Create Your Own Photo Library

I have photographing my family for the past 16 years! So needless to say, I have well over 10,000 photos. I'm blessed that I have not had a major computer crash where I lose everything. I did press the wrong button back in 2014 and deleted all of the photos I had taken between 2013 and 2014. I almost threw my laptop out of the window, literally. I knew then I had to have a back-up plan.

Then, I moved to using the external hard drive. Then, one day I accidentally stepped on it, but I was able to get the images recovered... for $1000! WHAT?! So, I learned a very expensive and valuable lesson: Keep your photos stored in more than one place! 

I still have an external hard drive for my back-ups, but I also back-up my photos thru Google Photos, and on CDs and flash drives for good measure. Once I got everything saved and stored, I put it all together to make my own little library. Here is a current photo of it.

So, here is my list of the basic storage options:

1. Online Storage: Online storage is a great option not only because you know they'll be there, but you can also access them from anywhere. So whether I'm taking a flight home or a road trip to Alabama (my favorite, by the way), I don't have to bring a bunch of CDs, flash drives, and external hard drives with me. I can log into my Google account (my storage method of choice) and pull up any photograph that I want to share with my family.

2. External Hard Drive: While I do have nightmares about my past experience with these little gadgets, they still are a really great way to back-up your photos. Keep in mind, their life span determines how you take care of it, so keep it stored in a dry, dark place and don't move it around until you have to!

3. Compact Disc (CD): These are the pawns of my library. I consider them my little expendable minute men. You'll want to watch how much space is on the disc you're saving your photos to. If it's a disc with 700 MB, you don't want to put more than 650 MB on it; and if you're saving files to a disc with 4.7 GB, you'll only want to use around 3.6 GB. Don't max out the space on these bad boys on space, because they will stop working without warning.

And there you have it, guys! Those are my recommendations to building your own photo library. You're building this library not only to show off your super skills, but as a way to properly store them so that you never have to deal with the heart break of losing those precious photos and memories!

Hit me up below in the comments if you know better methods that I could use! I hope you enjoyed this! Peace and love, peeps!