What are you doing with your 1000's of phone photos?

What are you doing with your 1000's of phone photos?

Author
Discussion

Mont Blanc

Original Poster:

1,871 posts

55 months

Tuesday 17th December 2024
quotequote all
I haven't put this in the photography forum, as it isn't really a photography or computing/technical issue, more of a bigger picture or personal preference thing.

I have, like many people, ended up with several thousand (7000 to be accurate) photos on my iPhone. Cars, holidays, kids, pets, family, friends, everything really. Probably 15 years worth.

Every couple of months I go through that 2 month period and delete any rubbish, and I'm left with photos that I want to keep and look at.

This has to stop, as I will end up with too many on there to ever look through, and I fear losing them all. A few weeks ago a colleague told me she had 14,000 photos on her phone and said she had no idea what she would ever do with them, but doesn't want to lose them.

Phone storage space isn't an issue these days with cloud storage, which actually makes it worse. It's the reason that we end up with so many on there.

I think we've gone backwards in respect of photos. Everyone's parents seem to have boxes full of packets and packets of actual printed photographs to look through, from the 70's to early 2000's, which is really nice. Now we just take photos and rarely do anything with them, and end up losing them on old hard drives, and certainly barely look at them.

What are you doing with all your photos? Are you having them printed into photo books? Are you storing them in the cloud forever? Any suggestions on how to offload them from my iPhone, and onto what medium?

CHLEMCBC

591 posts

29 months

Tuesday 17th December 2024
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Mine upload onto Amazon daily. I've never thought of what to do with them

Abc321

691 posts

107 months

Tuesday 17th December 2024
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Missus likes taking pictures and is very Instagram inclined. She had about 34,000 pictures on her phone. Issue is that people take 5-10 pictures of the same thing I find.

She went through them on a recent long haul flight and has got it down to about 19,000!

AB

17,957 posts

207 months

Tuesday 17th December 2024
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Mine upload to iCloud and Google Photos when phone is charging.

I've not deleted a photo since about 2005 and all my Whatsapp stuff saves to my camera roll. Nearly 100k photos and 30k videos.

I hope I never get raided and my devices seized biggrin

MrBen.911

573 posts

130 months

Tuesday 17th December 2024
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I have them backed up in multiple places, but beyond that I do virtually nothing with them. Which seems rather a shame.

I keep meaning to go through holiday/travel photos and get some albums printed etc, but never find the time.

I quite like that Google Photos will remind me what I did on this day x years ago, but it would be nice to properly enjoy them somehow.

Maybe a 36 image roll of film was better!

KobayashiMaru86

1,543 posts

222 months

Tuesday 17th December 2024
quotequote all
I do backup to network storage periodically but should look into Cloud too. Google could be OK but the last time I tried to redownload all the photos stored with Google for free they sent them in a zip file with all the exif data lost so all were the same date of download.

GetCarter

29,997 posts

291 months

Tuesday 17th December 2024
quotequote all
iPhone gives you a bunch of cloud space which can be uploaded automatically. You can up the amount of space to 50gb for about £8 a month.

JQ

6,257 posts

191 months

Tuesday 17th December 2024
quotequote all
Mont Blanc said:
I haven't put this in the photography forum, as it isn't really a photography or computing/technical issue, more of a bigger picture or personal preference thing.

I have, like many people, ended up with several thousand (7000 to be accurate) photos on my iPhone. Cars, holidays, kids, pets, family, friends, everything really. Probably 15 years worth.

Every couple of months I go through that 2 month period and delete any rubbish, and I'm left with photos that I want to keep and look at.

This has to stop, as I will end up with too many on there to ever look through, and I fear losing them all. A few weeks ago a colleague told me she had 14,000 photos on her phone and said she had no idea what she would ever do with them, but doesn't want to lose them.

Phone storage space isn't an issue these days with cloud storage, which actually makes it worse. It's the reason that we end up with so many on there.

I think we've gone backwards in respect of photos. Everyone's parents seem to have boxes full of packets and packets of actual printed photographs to look through, from the 70's to early 2000's, which is really nice. Now we just take photos and rarely do anything with them, and end up losing them on old hard drives, and certainly barely look at them.

What are you doing with all your photos? Are you having them printed into photo books? Are you storing them in the cloud forever? Any suggestions on how to offload them from my iPhone, and onto what medium?
I have 2TB of cloud storage which will hopefully store them indefinitely. Then every year my wife downloads all the best ones to one of the photobook sites and gets a large photobook for the year produced. We have books going back 12 years on the shelf and prior to that she had been getting digital photos printed at Costco and inserted into a traditional album. She also produces photobooks for any big events / holidays. Works well for us.

Dan_1981

17,656 posts

211 months

Tuesday 17th December 2024
quotequote all
Same concenr here.

Back up to google, back up to amazon but don't actually do anything with them.

But then again how often did my parents dig out the albums or the holiday pictures or anything else to have a quick flick through.


The only thing I do do is create and have printed a photo book every xmas with about 90/100 pictures from the year in it.

What do we do with that.... stick it on a book case and never look at it.

StevieBee

14,032 posts

267 months

Tuesday 17th December 2024
quotequote all
A few years back, I started to put everything into albums on Mac Photos. This included scans of loads of photos from way back. I found the process rather enjoyable and has become a bit of an obsession where I make sure all the facial recognition is in place and correct, locations and so on.

Currently up to 50,000 photos which is absurd really but quite cool when you're with mates reminiscing about a party in 1988 and are able to whip the phone out and find some photos from that party.

Everything I take now both with the phone and 'proper' camera gets sifted and allocated a place in the library.

For big events like holidays, will also get a nice photo book made up.


QuartzDad

2,525 posts

134 months

Tuesday 17th December 2024
quotequote all
If we go on a trip I'll sometimes order a photo book from Google, it's nice to have something physical to flick through.

This was from the NC500 this year.


GetCarter

29,997 posts

291 months

Tuesday 17th December 2024
quotequote all
QuartzDad said:
If we go on a trip I'll sometimes order a photo book from Google, it's nice to have something physical to flick through.

This was from the NC500 this year.

That second pic is just up the road from my house :0)


GAjon

3,864 posts

225 months

Tuesday 17th December 2024
quotequote all
What about one of those digital photo frame gizmo things ( apologies if that’s too technical).

You could just have it constantly scrolling in the background as a ornament type thing.

Only trouble if I got one it’d be , dogs, grand kids then bits of cars on a constant loop!

Mont Blanc

Original Poster:

1,871 posts

55 months

Tuesday 17th December 2024
quotequote all
GetCarter said:
iPhone gives you a bunch of cloud space which can be uploaded automatically. You can up the amount of space to 50gb for about £8 a month.
It isn't the storage thats the issue to be honest. My phone just offloads everything to iCloud each night so I've got loads of empty storage space on my phone, despite the 7000 photos. I pay couple of quid a month to have a decent amount of iCloud storage.

It's more the issue that like others in this thread, I'll soon end up with 10,000 or 20,000 photos and for what? To just keep paying Apple to store them for the rest of my life? I never seem to look through them in a digital format.

I'm just wondering what everyone was planning on doing with theirs to actually keep them in a format that they might look through and enjoy once in a while.

MrBen.911 said:
I have them backed up in multiple places, but beyond that I do virtually nothing with them. Which seems rather a shame.

I keep meaning to go through holiday/travel photos and get some albums printed etc, but never find the time.

I quite like that Google Photos will remind me what I did on this day x years ago, but it would be nice to properly enjoy them somehow.

Maybe a 36 image roll of film was better!
Totally agree.

I actually think a roll of film was better. At least the photos got physically printed, and we are still looking through them and enjoying them 20-30 years later.

SP_

2,935 posts

117 months

Tuesday 17th December 2024
quotequote all
GetCarter said:
iPhone gives you a bunch of cloud space which can be uploaded automatically. You can up the amount of space to 50gb for about £8 a month.
That's an outrageous price for 50GB only.

Mont Blanc

Original Poster:

1,871 posts

55 months

Tuesday 17th December 2024
quotequote all
GAjon said:
What about one of those digital photo frame gizmo things ( apologies if that’s too technical).

You could just have it constantly scrolling in the background as a ornament type thing.

Only trouble if I got one it’d be , dogs, grand kids then bits of cars on a constant loop!
I might look at something like that actually, might be a good idea.

Still can't shake the feeling that I should be doing an annual photo book or something, to physically have the photos in my possession.

I get much more pleasure out of looking through the packs of photos my parents have from the last 40+ years.

LimaDelta

7,231 posts

230 months

Tuesday 17th December 2024
quotequote all
I use Popsa to print a physical photo album every Christmas for the previous year. This gives us something to look though together, and means we will still have some family photos if somehow we lost our iCloud backup.

M11rph

843 posts

33 months

Tuesday 17th December 2024
quotequote all
SP_ said:
That's an outrageous price for 50GB only.
I pay 99p/month for 50GB with Apple.
200GB ... £2.99
2TB......... £8.99

24lemons

2,807 posts

197 months

Tuesday 17th December 2024
quotequote all
We have a Nixplay photo frame which you can wirelessly send photos to. Nice way to have your photos on display.

turbomoggie

239 posts

116 months

Tuesday 17th December 2024
quotequote all
I also have them backed up in a few places.
I think I'm going to start printing a few and maybe make the best photos/memories of the year albums.
I'm always worried that digital devices and cloud storage etc can be hacked.