Saving images in the cloud

I belong to a kind of transitional generation in terms of photography. In the 80’s and 90’s I took analogue photos myself and got the pictures developed. If a fire broke out in my house and they were destroyed, these things would be gone. But also the many digital photos that we accumulate in masses today. They also have to go somewhere, because they too could be lost quickly. So how do you get your pictures to safety?

Storing photos safely

You don’t think much about such things, but have you ever thought about whether your pictures are safe? In times of cell phones with a camera, pictures are created like a continuous line. I think I took more pictures of myself in 2013, 2014 etc. than I have pictures of my entire childhood.

When our son was born a few years ago, we took every step. This is now a huge amount of data. The only question is whether we will ever look at it all again, but that is another question.

Usually people do it by dragging their pictures from the camera to the PC or to an external hard drive. But what if they break or the house burns down? Then everything is gone. To prevent this there are alternatives.

For example, I did it in such a way that I saved all the pictures from my camera on an external hard drive. But also on DVDs. I burned three copies of these and left one copy each with my parents and my brother. How well they take care of it, I do not know yet. But now my house can safely burn down.

I digitized analog photos with the camera and also backed them up on the data media.

We also print out the best things in photo books and the grandparents also get a version of each.

A friend of mine did the same thing, only he keeps the hard disk in a fireproof safe at home. Together with the photos of all important documents.

After that, it’s almost only the cloud that remains for safe protection: Apple, Dropbox, sepstream.com, Google Drive, etc. are the most common. They’re certainly not bad, but to be honest I don’t trust these companies because I personally think they are the extended arm of the NSA. So I don’t really like them digging around in my pictures.

But, there are also providers, such as the site Bilder Upload, who come from Germany. There you get a free storage space assigned. The pictures are then online and accessible all over the world. You also get links to exchange the pictures with other users. So I feel a little bit more comfortable if I know that the provider has to follow German laws and privacy policies.

I think in the long run there is no way around storing our best and most important images in the cloud as well as on mobile data media. Then they are definitely well secured.