Mad in Pursuit Notebook

Managing Your Precious Photos

Jim at Little Colorado River Gorge, AZ, 2010 — Jim getting ready to take a picture. Little Colorado River Gorge, AZ, 2010.

Fear: that I'll lose my most precious photos. Plan: Cull the crap; add another backup for the "precious 100."

Dear Stella,

I'm back trying to manage my photo archives. My system is pretty good: photos are organized by year in folders on Dropbox. About once a year I get itchy—what if something catastrophic happens to my Dropbox account?

Last year I exported all my family history photos (19th c.-1947) to Google Drive, where they can be shared with the immediate family. (I need to remind them to download those photos to their own systems.)

Now I'm focused on the photos from my own lifetime, working backwards from 2024.

📷 First step, cull. What with traveling and my interest in fine photography over recent decades, I have wound up with 1000 to 2000 photos a year. So many near-duplicates. So many blurry eyes-closed people photos. Five different angles on a flower. Fifteen shots of the same starry sky. Delete, delete, delete. I've done seventeen years so far and got each year down to way less than 1000 images. (Ha, a more clear-headed person might do this culling right away.)

📷 📷 Side note. Why do I have ten photos of the same roadside view in New Mexico or Colorado? It reminds me that Jim and I pulled over, got out of the car, and gazed in awe at some glorious vista. We snapped photos. We weren't so much capturing the view as capturing that moment of wonder. The most treasured of these wind up being my photos of Jim taking photos.

stopping by the side of the road for photos — Roadside photo stop. 2010. Arizona.

📷 Second step, flag the most precious. What photos would make me grieve if they suddenly disappeared? I love all my summer photos of flowers and sunsets, but would I mourn their loss? I choose the best photos of family and friends, plus a sampling of other "great shots." I find there are about a hundred of those. I export them to OneDrive, Microsoft's cloud service, again in folders by year. Backed up!

📷 Third step, make a local external drive. Into those same chronological folders on OneDrive, I'm uploading documents—journals and other memorabilia. When I'm done, I'll download the OneDrive archive onto a portable drive that I can keep in a safe place.

This project is taking time, but I'm having fun revisiting all those old pictures. It would be easier to back up the whole kit and caboodle onto OneDrive, but, ugh, so much space for so much trash.

How about you, Stella? With all your travel, with all your beautiful family, how do you safeguard your photos?

Write soon, xoxo Susan
9 Mar. 2025

Books from Mad in Pursuit and Susan Barrett Price: KITTY'S PEOPLE: the Irish Family Saga about the Rise of a Generous Woman (2022)| HEADLONG: Over the Edge in Pakistan and China (2018) | THE SUDDEN SILENCE: A Tale of Suspense and Found Treasure (2015) | TRIBE OF THE BREAKAWAY BEADS: Book of Exits and Fresh Starts (2011) | PASSION AND PERIL ON THE SILK ROAD: A Thriller in Pakistan and China (2008). Available at Amazon.