We have loads of pictures spread across 3-4 computers, phones and cloud drives (Google/iCloud/Dropbox). Some are in packages like Apple Photos and others as jpegs on the file system.

I want to be able to gather them all into one place and would welcome any recommendations from those who may have solved this problem. At the moment it is looking like days of pain exporting, copying and deduplicating.

Google Photos. Just sign on from each machine and let them sync.

Most of mine are on Flickr organised in folders.

We are talking many many GB of photos. Really want something local

I bought a momentum from.kickstarter. It recognises photos, organises by people, dates, camera type etc. And gets better all the time. It will also at some point be able to do background scenes like snow etc. It syncs wirelessly and takes 2 hard drives by usb.

We are talking many many GB of photos. Really want something local

But the backup should be somewhere not local (to protect from fire/theft). The initial upload is a pain, but, I think, worth it.

How many GB? I have 90gb in google photo’s now. Anything new goes up there from every machine/device then I crop them back as I go. You can download the entire collection too

A GB isn’t so much these days. It is much easier to use Google Photos than backup to a NAS and then backup the NAS to a detachable drive to escape ransomware. Just make sure you use the paid version of Google Photos as the free version doesn’t use the full resolution version.

Office365 is also very good for 1TB of storage per user if you are using the home paid version plus you get the Office programs included.
You’ve just reminded me that I need to get that sorted as well…

Google charge about £2 a month for 100gb, which is not too bad.

If you let them compress images, you get unlimited storage space for free. Which may or may not be acceptable depending on your use.

Timely thread, was just thinking the same myself this week.

So I assume Google Photos compressing images means you can’t get a raw image back – but what quality does it take them down to?

Little more info:

https://support.google.com/photos/answer/6220791?hl=en-GB

I use high quality as I just take the odd pic with iPhone, and for basic use cannot tell the difference between the original and compressed. Other than file size.

If I had a DSLR etc, I’d pay the £15 a year for the storage I guess. As well as backing up locally.

Where you store the photos is a secondary consideration, the primary should be getting all your photos into a single place, ordered, de-duplicated and with descriptions of what each folder contains. No, really, it’ll be fun. 🙂

That is where the work is, and where you get the benefit. After doing that you need to ensure that you don’t start saving photos to different devices again.

Create a parent directory, then underneath, directories called:

<CCYY-MM-DD>-<description of event/contents>

The more complete the description, the easier it will be to search in the future – so a single folder “2016-06-21 – day out at legoland” is better than a folder containing “summer 2016”.

You could use an external drive to do this – cheaper, or a NAS, the latter having other benefits, but obviously costing more.

When you have things sorted out locally you’ll know what space you need for a cloud service and can then back them up to whatever cloud service doesn’t compress them.

Nuts to that. I’ll just let Google use it’s magic to organise, and create albums where be see. 😉

Nuts to that.

😀
Perfectly put.

Depends how well your photos are set up but IME its hard to avoid doing as cranberry suggests. The google back up is ok but its actually pretty hard to find certain photos. When it works its great, but sometimes it just doesn’t. I wouldn’t want a cloud only solution anyway so there will be some manual tidying up to do. Also worth doing a lot of deleting at this stage. Some stuff just isn’t worth keeping.

where be see.

Where necessary even. Stupid phone.

I use a NAS drive (which has local duplication covered) and I mean to back up each year to a USB drive and store it off site e.g. at parents house in case the place burns down etc.

The more complete the description, the easier it will be to search in the future – so a single folder “2016-06-21 – day out at legoland” is better than a folder containing “summer 2016”.

Doing all that by pathname is clunky and old-school, that’s what tagging is for.

I pay £60 a year to Flick for unlimited storage. Currently have 47GB uploaded.

For pure back up if you have amazon prime you get photo storage included.
For organising pictures I like lightroom but it is an arse to get it all set up.

I appreciate the replies but I think many are missing the point:-

“We have loads of pictures spread across 3-4 computers, phones and cloud drives (Google/iCloud/Dropbox). Some are in packages like Apple Photos and others as jpegs on the file system.”

“I want to be able to gather them all into one place”

Google drive etc.. is the end result, that is where I want to get to. I need some special “thing” that will trawl through all that lot and put them somewhere that isn’t me and copy/paste.

I think this is what many of you are recommending, yes?