One of my goals for 2021 is to consolidate all of my photos into one spot - ideally a cloud storage with a physical backup. I have photos on an external drive, picasa, amazon and google photos, Shutterfly and Walgreens that I want in one home. A super bonus would be identifying duplicates!
Amazon photos has been good but they’re making changes in June so I’m wondering if there are options available to purchase that can also do facial recognition. The ability to add documents is a plus. We are the custodians of 3 generations of family photos and documents so once they get scanned in I’d like to copy them onto zip drives to share.
A few thoughts here…
- If you consolidate all your photos onto a Windows 10 computer then the file utility can find duplicates if they have the same file name. I assume Macs can do this too. If the names are different I doubt any program on a home computer could find duplicates; it would have to do a checksum on every file and then look for duplicates. That would take a lot of time & memory
- A service such as dropbox makes it easy to share; You can get a 2TB account for around $100/year. As I think you realize from what you’ve written, sharing services are not the same as a backup service. A true backup service lets you recover deleted files from anytime in the past, not just the last 30 days. Given how precious family photos are you might want to buy a 2nd physical drive and after loading the photos give it to a family member to store away from your house
- depending on how many photos you have it may be easier/better to have a scanning service such as ScanCafe (the one we used) scan them in. They have much better scanners than users can afford, and they can scan negatives which have more detail than prints if you happen to still have the negatives. They also do minor retouching, YMMV
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Album Saver and Photo Stick are two options I found of a specific flash drive with built in software that scans your computer specifically for photos and automatically eliminate duplicates. Haven’t tried either one.
Reviews are mixed. Some say they did a great job getting photos but ignored organization (supposedly Album Saver saves organization which is a huge plus). How great the review is probably dependent on number of photos., I don’t want 10 years of vacation photos in a jumble.
I’ve bought a regular flash drive (high speed transfer so it doesn’t take a week) and put my photos I want specifically in a separate file. Going to try that route. l will let you how it goes!
Looking forward to hearing other solutions.
Google Photos, where I’ve stored my thousands of photos is making changes in June. I’m eager to find a replacement for storage.
In the same boat! I have photos on google photos, my various computers, an external hard drive, and in snapfish which I have used to make photo books and cards. I also have way too many actual photographs that need to be scanned. Google photos is fine, and I may just end up paying for additional storage come the summer.
Good suggestion on using a service to scan. I have been reluctant to send out my photos, as I fear they won’t come back!
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I have everything in Amazon Photos too (with lots of annoying dups), and hadn’t heard they are making changes in June, I will have to look into that.
I used a local photoshop to scan a ton of old family photos…I am sure it was more pricey than some places I could ship the pics too, but that made me too nervous they could get lost. Very happy with the local company’s turnaround time and quality. They put everything on a thumb drive and I uploaded to Amazon Photo.
A friend recently purchased a photo scanner specifically for archiving old photos. Evidently it is fast, and has great reviews. BUT, it was roughly $600. I calculated that you can have about 1500- 2000 photos scanned with a service for that amount, and not spend the time.
Then I thought, who needs 1500 photos archived? I’m the family member with most of the prior generation’s photos. My parents have maybe 2-4 formal shots from their wedding. That’s all I need. I don’t think my children will need, want, or ever look at the 30 or so we have from ours.
I also have old VHS tapes, we finally decided to convert. Many on this site recommended Elgato, but we first used a local service to test the likely outcome. I was relieved to discover the quality had not diminished (as far as I can tell) in 25+ years. But we had to spend hours to watch them to decide which to convert. It was a fun, and bitter-sweet trip down memory lane. Again, I’m not sure saving everything is of value. A “taste” of my children’s childhood is what I need, and not the hours of trip scenery. In fact even most photos of scenery may once have been a keeper, but now you can find any photos or videos you need (AND MORE) on the web.
To answer the OP question though, one online company that came recommended to us is “Forever”. (Google Forever photo storage).
@kjofkw that sounds like the scanner I got for Christmas. I don’t mind spending the time scanning them because I would spend a fair amount of time sorting through them before sending them out to be scanned anyhow. I just was hoping for a way to identify or at least link the people I don’t know together via facial recognition and then share with the rest of the family. It might be that I have to upload to google, or amazon, ID and tag people and download again to a external drive.
@mikemac, which utility did you use to find Windows 10 duplicates?
Any updates on this topic? I was looking into Google Scan and learned that it compresses photos and does not work well for later printing enlargements.
Any experience with the best plan to scan& upload old family photos to share with siblings and grandkids and allow the quality to be good enough that they can print large copies?