How do you store and organize your photos?

[WingsysRoost]

I know that plenty of people on this site (myself included) enjoy taking lots and lots (and lots) of photos, especially of their animals. They're too cute to not take pictures of! After that, though, comes the dreaded task of storing and sorting every single one of them.

Ideally, there would be some sort of (preferably free) database where each photo could be sorted into albums and tagged so that I can search for what I need in multiple different ways. I have no idea if something like that actually exists, but if not, it definitely should.

In any case, I'm looking for new ways to store my tens of thousands of photos and figured I would start this thread to see what everyone else is doing. Maybe it will give someone ideas and, even if not, it's always interesting to see how others do things!

 

[azurbanclucker]

Adobe bridge is the best one out there, and bridge is free. Drawback is that id doesn't really do slideshows per se. You can drop photos into a collection and then ctrl+L them but it's not really a slideshow.
https://www.adobe.com/products/bridge.html

StudioLine Photo basic 5 will cover pretty much all your bases. I haven't used it because I do all my workflow in the Adobe ecosystem, but from what I've seen of this it's easy to use and should work. Also free.

https://www.studioline.net/en/downloads/photo-basic/default.htm

You can do it with google photos and apple's photo app too, but those are cloud based and storage will cost you.

 

[helenbish]

I like order in everything and I like to organize my photos strictly according to the rules too. I don't like it when my gallery is a mess. I want it to be always in order. With every photo I take, I make sure that there are no identical or poor quality photos. Thanks to folders you can perfectly organize all the photos you have and even with a large gallery everything will be clear.

 

[Karasu]

I use folders on my PC sorted by class (e.g. Aves) and then into subfolders based on year it was taken, with some split for certain themes of photos like incubation, and a folder for the best photos so I can find them fast.) I back it up on a NAS and am looking into a cloud backup as well.

 

[azurbanclucker]

I use folders on my PC sorted by class (e.g. Aves) and then into subfolders based on year it was taken, with some split for certain themes of photos like incubation, and a folder for the best photos so I can find them fast.) I back it up on a NAS and am looking into a cloud backup as well.

I've been using backblaze as my cloud backup for years. It's a bit spendy at 70/yr but I've had to recover data twice due to hardware fails corrupting 2tb of stored media and it's been worth every penny. I follow the "3/2/1" backup philosophy.

3 copies
On at least 2 types of media
1 offsite.

So in my case, I have a 5TB drive array on my main pc, which I replicate to the local storage server (NAS), and also upload to backblaze.

 

[Karasu]

I've been using backblaze as my cloud backup for years. It's a bit spendy at 70/yr but I've had to recover data twice due to hardware fails corrupting 2tb of stored media and it's been worth every penny. I follow the "3/2/1" backup philosophy.

3 copies
On at least 2 types of media
1 offsite.

So in my case, I have a 5TB drive array on my main pc, which I replicate to the local storage server (NAS), and also upload to backblaze.

Great setup. Thanks for sharing.