“I’ve seen it all,” says the award-winning National Geographic photographer Ami Vitale, about backing up her photos. “I’ve had hard drives fail throughout my career. For example, back when I first started as a photographer, I had a very nice hard drive system in my home, and the whole thing failed.” In retrospect, Ms. Vitale says, she would have definitely set the system up differently.
“I lost some historic moments from the first part of my career,” she says, “and they’re gone forever.”
Ms. Vitale may shoot photos differently from how most of us capture images these days — she shoots with a digital single-lens-reflex camera (or DSLR). But her cautionary tale should resonate, since many of the same vulnerabilities exist when photographing with smartphones. In other words, if you’re snapping away without a backup plan for your photos, beware: In an instant, you could lose them all, forever.
Before I explain how to back up your photos, it’s useful to understand one important aspect of digital photos that relates to storing them properly. Namely, image resolution.
Every digital photo has a certain image resolution, which is the total number of pixels that make up a photo. If an image you shot on your smartphone, say, is 4,000 pixels high by 3,000 pixels wide, it contains a total of 12 million pixels (the height multiplied by the width). Since one million pixels is known as a megapixel, the resolution of your smartphone image is 12 megapixels.
Now, say you upload that photo to Facebook. When you post it, Facebook, in most instances, downsizes the resolution, or reduces the number of pixels to make it smaller. It may digitally compress it, too, throwing out additional data important to image quality. However, it’s often difficult to visually detect if an image file has been altered, particularly on a smartphone’s small screen. It’s why you might think you’ve backed up your image when uploading it to Facebook or other social media sites, but that’s not really the case.
But right now, most websites, including social media and even photo-printing sites, aren’t designed to truly store photos. That’s because when you back up your photos, you want to be able to retrieve an image file that is as close to, if not identical to, the original photo you captured on your phone or digital camera. That’s also why you want to carefully choose a backup solution, whether it’s online or an external hard drive.
The PhotoStick – Easy and Secure Backup Of All Your Photos And Videos On Your Phone Or Computer
Photo Stick – It offers easy and secure backup of all your photos and videos on your phone and computer. And all this in just a few minutes.
ThePhotoStick is designed to offer easy and secure backup of all your photos and videos on your phone and computer. ThePhotoStick looks like a flash drive and is also well known as Photo Stick and Photostick.
The PhotoStick has its own software that automatically scans, finds, organizes and then backs up photos, videos and even documents scattered all over your computer.
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