It Takes Longer Than You Think - Sharing and Organizing Family Photos

I have a 2 terabyte back up drive that I have been using to hold all my pictures, back up several of my old computers and it holds all our music. Well, I am embarrassed to say that it is full! I just purchased a 6 terabyte drive to transfer all the important stuff onto along with videos I will be transferring over soon.

Having blogged for the past nearly 8 years now and posting five days a week or more, you can imagine, I have LOTS of pictures. If each post has an average of 7 pictures, times the 2000 posts, that is 14,000 pictures just for the blogs.

I take at least three times that much per blog so that I can have a good variety or clearer shot and then I can choose which to use while posting. That 14,000 turns into 42,000. One would think that I would then go back and delete any pictures I didn't use for the post but usually it is late and I am ready for bed. I also have over 400 videos on youtube and at least that many again I haven't posted so that takes up a large amount of space as well. Plus, my camera takes high quality pictures so that takes up more memory for each picture as well. 

Currently, it is after 4 a.m. and I am disgusted that I am still awake. A few years back, I started a private page where I could upload all my extended family pictures of all the events that I have taken pictures of since 2005 when I went digital. 

I lost many pictures from before that as I had an issue with someone sending me viruses regularly so I was grateful to get that dealt with and move on from there. 

Since then, I was really good at backing up all my photos onto cd's, dvd's as well as having a back up drive to store all the pictures in one file. I also have a "back up" of the "back up" stored off site as I don't ever want to have the issue of losing pictures again. 

Awhile back, my cd / dvd burner wasn't working and so I stopped backing them up on cd but then was afraid to erase the sd cards without having a back up so I have about 15 sd cards that are full and some have been put on my back up drive and then the back up to the back up but unless they are backed up two different ways, I have not reused those sd cards. 

Also, without a dvd burner, I wasn't able to share all the pictures with my large extended family so starting the online storage page where they could download the pictures, made it wonderful for me so I could upload the pictures and then delete those my own family wasn't in saving space. However, I started in 2015 with the page and only uploaded through 2011 as my internet was so slow I couldn't upload more than ten pictures at a time so I gave up on that project until this week. 

You know recently I switched my internet service to a different company and I have been SO happy. It is still slow compared to larger cities and I am paying the same amount as I was to the other carrier but I am getting a steady service that is reliable and I am SO happy to say that this week, I have been able to upload thousands of pictures to several different pages for my mothers side of the family and my siblings etc. 

I am SO happy to be able to get the back up drive organized. I have "blog files" by year and there are so many pictures in those files that I don't back those up as it would take days. I also realized that the hub I was using was slowing things down so I plugged the back up drives directly into the computer for the uploads which sped things up some. 

I know several of my siblings never took cameras to events and holidays so for some, the pictures I took when they were young are some of the only holiday pictures they have. Now that everyone has cell phones, they all take them themselves and my uploads for the past few years won't take long as I haven't taken as many due to that fact and that everyone is getting older and the "cute" stages passed so most of the pictures are people posing together verses the funny playing pictures. 

I found a few files called, "Things I need to blog about" and I laugh as I would never go back and blog about those things now. I have shared in the past that I take the pictures and then get busy and just blog about what I am doing currently rather than the ten things I did last week. So, I tend to think that I have blogged about something since I remember taking the pictures for the post, but then I get busy and don't post about it. Then, someone asks for a recipe or something and I tell them to check my blog only to have them contact me and tell me it isn't on my blog. 

Of course, I search my blog only to find that I never actually posted the recipe or event which makes me sad as I have lost some great recipes for things thinking I posted about them. Then, I can't find the recipe again or it was something I made up and we enjoyed and since I didn't post about it, it is lost forever. We had a great mint / chocolate / coconut popcorn we LOVED and we have looked for years to find a similar recipe but I know we kind of experimented and made it up and we all thought I had blogged about it but just the other day while home on holiday, Princess Five said how sad she was that we lost that recipe. 

I have the last few years on the back up drive to organized and then I have the last year on sd cards that all need to be downloaded and backed up as it was about this time last year my computer died so I have another few busy days ahead with that.

Once that is done, I need to transfer over all the pictures to a new larger back up drive along with the memory stick pictures Princess Four sent home from her mission for me to back up so I can send it back empty for her to fill up again and send home. I also have a back up drive of most of our movies and want to have a separate one for just music. It wouldn't be the end of the world if our music was lost but the videos and pictures would be devastating. 

I purchased a video capture product and want to start transferring all our vhs tapes to digital..... That is a dream for the future as I have so much on my "to do" list currently. For now, I needed to get this done as I said, my back up drive is full and I am stuck to get things done until I move the pictures over but don't want to transfer multiple copies or in an unorganized way as eventually, I want to make a back up drive for all the girls with documents, videos, pictures, and family history on them. I promised them I wouldn't leave them the mess my mother left with all the history, pictures and videos on pallets full of boxes. 


I have shared over the years how stressful that has been and how I am no where near done with her stuff and how I have boxes and bins in many rooms in my home and garage. I need to get much of it done before Princess Four comes home in June. They said she would be home at the end of April but messed up and now her arrival is scheduled for June 7th ish. 

Her room is a recordings studio so I need to get back working on that. I haven't done anything since May.... 

Yea for getting things off the "to do" list and I was able to share lots of pictures with friends today uploading them through IM on facebook so I got those out of my back up drive as well. Yahoo for that! 

Have a BLESSED and Happy Day!