If you’re like many iPhone users, you have more photos than you know what to do with. Organizing them is a monumental task, but not organizing them leads to digital chaos. And what good are all those photos if you can’t find the one you’re looking for? Naturally, you raise a question — what is the best way to store digital photos for the long term?
Organizing and storing your photos is a multi-step process that requires decluttering, labeling, and storing. While it’s not difficult, it does require putting in some time, especially if you have thousands of images.
This article will examine several different storage methods for digital photos and videos so you can choose the option that meets your needs.
Once upon a time, photographers and families would have their photos printed at the local pharmacy. Then, they would spend hours sorting the photos and putting them into albums that took up way too much space on their bookshelves. I still have a few of those albums, and I remember fondly those days of picking up my photos at the pharmacy and looking through them before I even got home.
Today’s photo storage looks much different. If you keep all of your photos on your computer or phone and nowhere else, you risk losing them if your device breaks, is lost, or is stolen. Which is why it’s so important to back them up to the cloud or an external drive. You may not look through your photos often, but you would certainly miss them if they disappeared forever.
The method you use to store your photos depends on how many you have and how often you want to access them. Before you decide on a storage method, take some time to declutter and organize your images so you know the extent of your photo library.
You’ve got thousands and thousands of photos on your iPhone, and when you open your photo library, all you can do is cringe and sigh. You scroll endlessly trying to find that shot of you and your bestie at the beach last summer, but it’s buried somewhere, and you don’t have time to dig through everything.
It’s time for a little tough love and a lot of decluttering. CleanMy®Phone makes the tedious chore of managing the photo library on your iPhone or iPad easy, and it’s the best way to get rid of those blurry and duplicate shots that are taking up space on your device.
CleanMy®Phone uses an advanced AI model to analyze and sort your media files, selecting those you may no longer want to keep. You will still have to manually go through your photos and delete them, but you can browse the different categories to make finding unwanted images a little easier.
The length of time the decluttering process takes will depend on how many photos you have, but all you have to do is download CleanMy®Phone, tap Scan, and start working through the different categories.
Spend some time on this process before moving on to the next step.
Once you’ve paired down your photo library, you can determine the best way to organize digital photos as well as store them. There are two main ways to store your images: cloud storage or an external hard drive.
Another option is to save your photos on an external hard drive or USB flash drive. While this is a cheaper option, there are a few downsides. For one, your hard drive could fail or get lost. For another, you won’t be able to access your photos unless you physically connect your device to your external drive. This may be an inconvenience for those of you who like to look through your photos often.
Many professional photographers will use a combination of both methods for extra peace of mind. As for me, I use cloud storage exclusively and try and be ruthless when deleting photos so I don’t have too much clutter. Even though I go through my photos monthly, I still have more than 100,000 stored in the cloud. It’s a work in progress.
With cloud storage, you can essentially set it and forget about it—until you run out of space and have to declutter or pay more money. Here are a few choices for cloud storage.
If you are an iPhone user, the easiest storage method is iCloud. You can set it to automatically sync with your phone so that it is automatically saved to iCloud whenever you take a photo or video.
Basic iCloud storage with 5 GB is free and is built into every Apple device. If you’re an avid photographer, you know that 5 GB won’t get you very far. The current price for iCloud+ is $0.99 per month for 50 GB, $2.99 per month for 200 GB, and $9.99 for 2 TB.
The best part about iCloud is that once you set it up, you don’t have to worry about your photos and videos. The downside is that if you delete a photo off of your iPhone, it’s also deleted from iCloud, so there’s no failsafe for when you accidentally delete something.
Google Photos is another really easy cloud storage platform with some benefits over iCloud. Like iCloud, Google Photos can be set up to automatically back up all of your photos, but unlike iCloud, you can delete a photo from your iPhone, and it will still show up in your Google Photos library.
Another great thing about Google Photos is that it uses advanced AI for its search function making it easier to find lost photos. Simply type a description of the photo into the search bar, and Google Photos will show you results based on the search. It can be as detailed as ‘black dog chewing a bone’ or as broad as a year or a location. This feature has saved me countless times when I didn’t have time to go through thousands of images.
All Google accounts include 15 GB of storage. After that, you can upgrade to 200 GB for $29.99 per year, 2 TB for $99.99 per year, or 5 TB for $249.99 per year.
There are a few other cloud-based storage options worth considering. Dropbox is useful if you plan on sharing your large photo files with others. Pricing starts at $16.58 per month for 3 TB of storage space.
Amazon Photos comes with an Amazon Prime membership and offers free unlimited high-resolution photo storage and 5 GB of video storage. It can be set up to automatically backup all of your devices.
Finally, if you use Adobe products like Photoshop and Lightroom to edit your images, you can use their Creative Cloud storage. This will allow you to quickly edit photos from any device and then automatically save your catalog with originals and edits.
The Adobe Creative Cloud Photography Plan is $9.99 per month and includes Photoshop and Lightroom with 20 GB of cloud storage. You can upgrade to 1 TB of cloud storage for $19.99 per month.
If you want to include a physical backup for your photos, you will have to purchase an external hard drive. This can be a small USB flash drive or a larger SSD hard drive. Both of these can connect directly to your iPhone for transferring your photos after which you can delete them from your phone to save space.
Here’s how to save your photos to an external hard drive from your iPhone. Note that when exporting edited photos and videos to an external hard drive, only the unmodified original will be exported.
If you are using an iPhone 15 or newer model, you can even record video directly to an external drive to save space on your iPhone.
Whether you choose to save your photos to a cloud-based platform, an external hard drive, or a combination of both will depend on how many photos you have and how easily you want to access them. Whatever method you choose, it’s important to make decluttering and organizing a regular part of your digital life.