Managing photos

One thing that's been in my mind recently is the problem of managing the ever growing number of digital photos I accumulate. This was on my mind again because I've just bought a new laptop. This means I'll probably use my old laptop less, but that laptop has hundreds of photos on and I don't want to lose/forget about them. The problem is wider than that; I've also got photos on my phone, PC and some old hard disks sat in a box in my office.

Now I know there are solutions to this already, and the cloud is the big thing at the moment. Why not transfer all my photos to some cloud storage solution? If I have an iPhone (which I don't) it can even automatically store photos in the iCloud for me. Well I have a couple of problems with that. Firstly I want something really simple, and not tied to any particular vendor (bye bye Apple!). I also don't want to rely on anyone else. I don't want my photos to be dependent on my internet connection.

It seems the best solution for me is to keep a master copy of all my photos somewhere I can easily access it (eg my new laptop), and keep a backup copy too just in case. The backup copy can just sit on an external hard disk, which I keep safe. A decent fireproof box in the garage should do it. Can't think of many situations where I'd lose both copies.

Of course I need some way of synchronising files between my various sources and my laptop, and also a way of backing up files to my external disk. Being a software developer obviously I wrote my own sync program.