Storing Your Beautiful Family Memories
People are constantly taking pictures every day — and while the age of smart phones has made taking pictures much simpler and more streamlined — the process of storing the photos is still complicated. Your first decision to make is whether you want to store your photographs locally or over a cloud.
Locally means photos are stored directly on your device (phone, computer, tablet, etc) and taking up space on your local drive. So if you buy an iPhone with 32 gigabytes of data, and you store your photos locally, each photo taken (and kept) is reducing that 32 GB’s of data.
Storing photos over a cloud means the files are available through a storage service online — which also has a cap on memory, but it’s dedicated to your photos as opposed to having lots of other information on it as well (like your local storage).
Today basically every major online company offers a cloud service — including tech giants like Apple, Microsoft, Amazon and Google.
Depending on what type of devices you have, Apple’s iCloud service is extremely popular and helps streamline your experience with Apple products. When you take a picture with your phone, that photo will immediately be viewable on your MacBook, your iPad and your Apple TV.
However, if you’re someone who takes pictures with a regular camera as opposed to phone, you might want something not so mobile-oriented. Microsoft’s OneDrive cloud service could work better for you as it has the ability to store RAW files.
If you’re old-fashioned and feel more comfortable storing your photos locally, there are affordable options such as external hard drives that would suit your needs. And they’re much more simple than clouds — you just plug them into your computer and drag/drop the files. Or you can set it to automatically back up certain folders when you plug it in. The downside to this is that photos taken on your phone won’t be immediately backed up.
The simplest metaphor is this — imagine you’re a movie-buff: you could buy DVD’s and have them take up room in your house, or you could just use Netflix to stream the movies — taking up no room in your house, but requiring a connection (internet/cellular) to access. There are pros and cons to each — it just boils down to personal preference.
Author: Aaron Bharucha