Photo and Video Storage Made Easy

Statistics show that more than 1 trillion pictures are taken every year, thanks largely to the advancement of smartphones. You’ll no doubt take your share, too. What are you going to do with your photos? With hundreds of options available for photo and video storage, the choices can get overwhelming. Should you store them on social media for everyone to see? Should you store them on flash drives for compact storage? Or should you use a cloud service so you can access them anywhere? Whatever your choice, one thing is clear — you do need to make one. Luckily, some methods are easier to use than others. You just need to figure out what you need. Here’s an easy guide to figuring it out.

Social media

Social media has taken our world by storm. In fact, 72% of Americans use at least one social media platform. Many people use it to store their photos and videos. It’s an easy way to share them with friends and family, and they’re easy to access by date later on. But this type of storage has a few drawbacks. For one, sites such as Facebook and Instagram compress your images to keep them from taking up too much space and slowing down their sites. So, if you ever want to retrieve them or download them for another purpose, you’ll get poorer quality images. Secondly, not everyone wants to share every single photo or video on social media. These people need a more private way to share them with the people they love.

Cloud services

Cloud storage services are great. They represent huge advancements in technology. They make it easy to store your images online and retrieve them from anywhere. But you have to be careful with these as well. These services are expensive and unstable. When the whole cloud storage thing began, a lot of sites offered free storage, but as business grew, they started charging fees. Just take a look at Flickr, which recently revamped under SmugMug and put strict limits on its accounts. You now have to pay for what was free before. Also, storing your photos and videos on sites like these means you’re at the mercy of a company’s server. Should they get attacked or go down, you’d be left without your files. 

Physical storage

Of course, you can always store your files on a physical storage system, and you have plenty of options to meet your needs. Some people keep their images on their SD cards. They just remove them from their camera when they’re full and slide a new one in. This is a suitable means of storage for the most part. Most of today’s computers have SD slots so that you can insert the card and upload images for editing. Another option is the CD. As long as you’re careful with your CDs, you can safely store your files on them for many years. The same goes for flash drives. The thing to keep in mind with all these forms of storage, though, is that your files can get corrupted with repeated use. Other physical storage methods are your computer or an external hard drive. 

The best option

Instead of risking your files, you should find a solution that will store them safely and make them easy to share. For example, ibi made by sandisk is a home-based device with 2 terabytes of space with which you can store almost unlimited photos and videos. With it, you can organize all of your photos in one space, including your smartphone, computer, and shared files. You can also choose who can see them, you can maintain their quality, and you can retrieve them any time you need to.