A Digital Photo Hub is the one location where you store all your digital photos and videos. It’s just a single folder where you collect all your digital photos and videos together. Keeping everything in one place makes it easier to use, organize, protect, and maintain your digital collection.
But what’s the best location for your Digital Photo Hub?
You want it to be easy to access your photo collection.
- Your computer is the perfect place to keep your Digital Photo Hub, just make your folder in your Pictures folder.
- However, many of us are finding our digital photo collections too big to keep on our computers! If this is the case I recommend keeping your Digital Photo Hub on an external hard drive. It will still be easy to access, and you won’t need to rely on Wi-Fi or an internet connection.
Storage tip:
- Most personal photo collections can be stored on a 1 TB external hard drive.
- If you have large videos, lots of duplicates, or plan to do some organizing with your photos, I recommend you invest in a 2 TB external hard drive to give yourself some space to work.
An external hard drive has an estimated life expectancy of 5 years. I like to put a sticker on mine recording the month and year I purchased it. This helps me to remember how old it is. I purchase a new one every three years and just copy my Digital Photo Hub to the new external hard drive. I keep the old one as a backup copy.
Protect your Digital Photo Hub with two backup copies.
- I keep my first backup copy on an external hard drive (a separate external hard drive from the one that holds your Digital Photo Hub).
- My second backup copy in an online storage site. I recommend Dropbox, Forever, Amazon Photos, OneDrive or Google Photos for online storage.
You can organize the photos in your Digital Photo Hub or leave them as they are when you collect them. Organizing them makes it easier to find things but it’s just as easy to back up and protect an unorganized folder of photos as it is to back up an organized folder of photos.
The most important thing you can do to protect your photos is to make a back up copy of them. And the easiest way to do this is to create a Digital Photo Hub folder to collect them all to one location. Then you just need to make a back up copy of the one Digital Photo Hub folder.
If you would like more information about collecting all your digital photos and videos into a Digital Photo Hub you can find step by step instructions in our Digital Photo Organizing course. Photos trapped on memory cards? We show you the easiest way to transfer your photos and videos from memory cards and all the other places they’ve been waiting for you to recover them. See our course here: Digital Photo Organizing