An external hard drive is a great way to back up your photos and other files. It can also be used to store your photos if you don't have much space on your computer or phone. To keep your data safe, choose external drives or bulk flash drives with good security protocols, such as password protection or encryption.
If you're handling a large number of photos in the hundreds or thousands, you might be beyond plastic sleeves and binders. In this case, use photo bins. You can make your own photo bins out of just about anything in your home. From decorative bins to printer paper boxes, this is a really easy DIY project.
Use recordable media
Recordable media such as SD cards, CDs, and DVDs can all be a great way to backup your photos. MicroSD cards with 512GB or 1TB space are not uncommon now and will make it extremely convenient for you to store media without having to worry about transferring data every few weeks.
In your photo managing system, create folders for each year of photos you have. Then place the corresponding photos in these folders. Once you've sorted your photos by year, go into each folder and create subfolders. You can label and further sort your photos by month, event, vacation, etc.
Use preservation-quality folders and boxes that are large enough to fully enclose and support the photographs. Avoid using acidic cardboard shoe boxes! Photographs in poor condition or that have special value can be individually stored in stable plastic sleeves made from preservation-quality polyester or polyethylene.
In most cases, taking the chronological approach makes the most sense. Depending on the number of photos you have, you may want to organize by decade then break it down into years. The advantage of sorting chronologically is that it will be easier to find duplicate images, which you can then discard.
With 1 TB of data, you can store an average of 100,000 photos with today's smartphones, and roughly 250,000 documents can fit on a 1TB drive. 1TB or 2TB of data storage is more than enough digital storage for most people.
One terabyte gives you the option of storing roughly: 250,000 photos taken with a 12MP camera OR. 250 movies or 500 hours of HD video OR. 6.5 million document pages, commonly stored as Office files, PDFs, and presentations.
SSDs have been heralded as a more stable storage medium, and they are faster to read and write data, but they are not without their own issues. While SSDs have significantly lower replacement rates than hard drives, when they fail they tend to fail big time, with less chance of recovering lost images.
You may be tempted to use a clear plastic box that's advertised as being acid-free. But Smithsonian Institution Archives conservator William Bennett advises against this because we don't yet know how plastic interacts with photographs over the course of a century. It's safer to use time-tested paper boxes.
The best long-term solution for physical photo storage is an external hard drive or a NAS (Network Attached Storage) if you are a bit more technical-minded. An external hard drive connects to your computer through a USB port. Some models require a power source. Others draw their power from your computer.
A very rough estimate based upon what I have would be about 35 GB for 10,000 photos.
A desktop external hard drive gives you all the digital storage you need at home. These hard drives are bigger than the portable options. But they offer incredible storage for your home office. They're ideal for photographers with thousands and thousands of photos and catalogs.
200GB can hold as many as 55500 JPEG images at a resolution of 12MP. It can also store around 5555 images for the much larger RAW images at the exact resolution. If you've to store JPEGs at the highest possible quality, that could be around 30,300 images.
How many photos or files can you fit in 2TB of storage? With 2 TB of data, you can store an average of 200,000 photos with today's smartphones, and roughly 500,000 documents can fit on a 2TB drive. 2TB or 1TB of data storage is more than enough digital storage for most people.
A hard drive can store thousands of image files and hours of video footage. You plug it into your device using a USB cable and transfer the photos. Thus, your photos will be safely stored even if the worst happens to your computer.
External HDD: large storage capacity
You can store 40 movies in 4K quality and more than 80,000 high-resolution photos on a 4TB hard drive. There are even hard drives available with a storage capacity of up to 20TB.
Depending on some factors, 50GB can hold between 1 000 to 20000 images. The standard iPhone camera shoots at 12MP, which is about 3.6MB in JPEG and 36 MB in RAW.
Sort chronologically
Start by sorting the photos chronologically. Any other sorting option is just too confusing and crazy-making. Think big picture by dividing first into two piles according to century. Next, sort each pile by decade—even if that requires a wild guess—and so on until you have them in general order.