Photographs are some of our most prized possessions. Tekkie Help experts SARAH and BO are passionate about helping people keep photos (and data) safe. They feel that organising, managing and protecting our digital photos should be a top priority. Their number one piece of advice? Create a centralised location where photos are stored in full-size resolution. Here’s a handy guide to creating a Digital Photo Hub of your own.
The Key Principle of a Master Photo Library
We are all guilty of this: photos scattered across multiple computers, external hard drives, CDs and various social media platforms. This makes it incredibly difficult to manage, let alone ensure that they are safely backed up. If you have all your photos in one location, you can start to organise the photos within – remove duplicates, add missing dates, create albums, print books and most importantly, backup everything.
Setting up a Digital Photo Hub
The main objective is to store all photos in full-sized resolution in one location. One of the first pitfalls people encounter with setting up a digital photo hub is a lack of storage space on their computer. Many newer computers come with solid-state drives (SSDs) where the storage capacity is generally quite small. For an average family’s photo library, we recommend a computer with a minimum capacity of 1 to 2TB.
If you don’t have enough space on your computer to save all in full resolution photos, you can consider upgrading the hard drive to increase storage capacity or buying a new computer. Tekkie help can provide free advice on both options.
What about the Cloud?
If you have a computer with a 128GB, 256GB or 500GB SSD and your library is sitting happily on your computer, the chances are that your photo library is synchronised with the Cloud, meaning the photos are not stored on your computer in full resolution, but are instead “optimised” to fit (for example, as thumbnail images). The risk here is that there’s no backup and if you ever lost access to your Cloud account (trust us, this happens!), then you’ll lose access to all your full-resolution images. We therefore always recommend having a master library with full resolution images.
Next Steps
Once you’ve set up your digital photo hub, you’ll be in a position to start bringing order to your digital photo library and set up a robust backup.
If you need more guidance on setting up your digital hub and anything else related to photo management and organisation, Tekkie Help runs hands-on and interactive training workshops (tekkiehelp.com/it-training) to teach people how to set up a photo hub, how to use the Cloud, add metadata to photos for more efficient searching, create albums and smart albums, share photos and most importantly how to set up a robust and foolproof backup for your precious memories.
For more information, call 8113 8682 or visit tekkiehelp.com.
For more helpful tips head to our Living in Singapore section.
This article first appeared in the November 2020 edition of Expat Living. You can purchase the latest issue or subscribe, so you never miss a copy!
