Where did I put my photos?

We had two computer crashes last week, one was a mother board failure on my wife’s Sony laptop - write off! The other was an ongoing Microsoft lock up- never sure whether this is really hardware or software.

Anyway the outcome is a need to move our family photo folders. I don’t know if we are unusual but we’ve ended up with duplicate folders and have never cleaned up the original folders to remove the rubbish pictures. So the task gets ever more complicated. You might think that being in the photo calendar and diary business that everything would be slick in the Adey household, well its not and the problem seems to be getting worse. I’m sure there is some clever software out there to compare and manage our photos but I’ve never managed to use it effectively and every time we get a new smart phone or digital camera then someone loads some more useless photo management software.


I console myself that I can’t be unique and others even less technical must find photo storage to be hell. I’m not about to provide an answer but I hope one day to have one of those Eureka moments like the first time I used Google. So someone will make a lot of money in the next few years sorting out all this photo storage.

Facebook is great and I look at more photos from my family and friends than I do anywhere else, but the images are low resolution and are no answer to my storage problem. Or maybe this is the answer and that we don’t really all need to keep high resolution images? It seems counter to the present strategy of camera manufacturers which is to create ever high resolution images and it’s only getting worse with high resolution video content. I know all you Apple types use iPhoto but I’m not about to change platforms and I don’t think the bulk of the population will.

It will be interesting to watch the impact of the iPad and iPhone 4 on the photo market, my experience is that dominant standards do occur in maturing markets but we still have some way to go on this one. It’s particularly relevant to my company www.calendarwizard.co.uk as we rely on everyone’s personal photos not being captured on massive and remote servers.

So back to the scrapped laptop and the desktop at the menders. I will continue to struggle by moving ever bigger and duplicated folders between computers. I have considered some network attached storage but it all seems too complicated and I’ve just realised that I actually see most of the family photos on a screen saver when duplication doesn’t matter. Let’s all hope Moore’s law continues to work and I can afford the storage.