Photo indexing

I have 300GB of videos and photos and all are in a Folder called (believe or not) Videos and photos.
Within that folder are other folders of each trip with its own name.
Within each trip are folders of each days photos and videos which can be referenced back to our trip diary
The root folder is duplicated across 3 Ext HDDS
For just randoms they are in C:/ Documents/ My Pictures.

When travelling we backed up each day onto 2 portable HDD's kept in separate suitcases

https://www.qnap.com/solution/mac-users/en/

I have had one of these devices for about six years now.
I wirelessly backs the whole benchtop hard drive every evening automatically. It has two hard drives equalling 4 terabytes.
One drive is for photos and important docs and the other does the hard drive of the computer.
Last year I picked up a virus from a non genuine Australia Post email that locked up every PDF on my machine.
The virus developer held me to ransome with a code to unlock if I paid up.
If I had not had a qnap I would have lost a lot.

In terms of photo management/indexing of our own photos we have always used Picassa. It stores photos into collections and albums and auto-indexes by date and has various search options to allow you to quickly retrieve. One such option is to search by tags but of course you have to add the tags to the pics as you store them. I have way too many photos to bother tagging all, but I know the type of photos that are worth tagging so there are some that get tag on the way in. I am thankful when I need to quickly find a pic.

However, if I need a pic and know I don't have it in my library - I have membership to some online royalty free libraries. The royalty free bit means you can use without attribution, however the service requires a fee per image to download - usually you sign up and pay for a set number of credits then select pics based on credits. Note that using Google image search will also bring up lots of pics that might suit your needs but copyright protection is always implied even if there is no watermark. Google indexes images from pages. You must open the page - and if a creative commons or royalty free statement is not clear then the pic must be assumed to be copyright protected. Many people blatantly just reuse pics from via a Google image search so perhaps don't realise these legalities and of course the social media world is alive with image sharing so the whole copyright issue has been somewhat diluted in the minds of the public but the rules have not changed.

If you want to get serious and also have an excellent photo editing tool you can't go past Lightroom and these days the price is coming down to affordable levels.
As Michelle says Picasa is a good free tool, unfortunately it's not as user friendly as it used to be and now has more storage capacity restrictions.

I also use external hard drives to back up my photos.

Cheers
Dunc.

Being an Apple User I just use iPhoto...

Regards, Baz

When my sister had a Dell laptop, she could tag photos with multiple tags, eg Bridge, River, Victoria, for easy retrieval.

I keep mine in folders by date of trip, with each long trip having sub folders for photos a a specific area. This is just using Windows Explorer. So if I want a photo of for example Lawn Hill, I go to 2009 trip and the folder Qld border to Lawn Hill.

This is very simple to retrieve travel photos quickly, but not so easy to retrieve if I wanted to look at all my photos of bridges - I have to remember where I took photos of bridges. That is where a programme with tagging function would help.

Same as others above. All photos managed by Picassa and the network backup is with Seagate Benchtop. All photos are in subject based named folders starting with F:/Photos as the top level with many levels of folders under it. Each folder name showing the photo category underneath it. No discrimination between photos and videos.

I recommend that you use Picassa and start naming photos and videos as you put them on the computer. This is one job worth doing and worth doing properly.
We don't use the cloud. The main backup disk is in a fireproof safe and well hidden in case of theft or fire. If needed I share on Photobucket.com (see vk1dx). I couldn't go through this again. Luckily I started with my first computer.

Edit: All photos are named giving an insight to the subject matter. I have also scanned family photos going back to the 1800's. eg the one below is of my great great great uncle James (Jemmy) Tyson.

Phil

Thank you every one for your suggestions.

I am at the moment putting most of my photos into correctly named folders.
I had totally forgotten about Picassa, I did have that on a earlier computer so have downloaded it onto the current computer and am using it now.

I will have to sort out a back up method now.

This is a work in progress, but I'm on holidays at the moment and since its a bit warm I will stay indoors and spend some time on this project.

William

We were recently hit with ransomware, I had 2T of bird photos encrypted, Google drive encrypted, and other computers on the same network done over as well
The problem is that these viruses can move to any share at all, and they work very quickly. Ours came in on a power bill. If your computer can see the drive, then so can the virus.

I dont know, but suspect strongly that any cloud storage is accessible through shares, our Google drive was hit in seconds because our computers could "see" that drive.

I had 2 x NAS drives (network available storage?" with all my photos on, Netgear 12 T devices, and because I had a mapped drive to them, they were both hit.
Interesting thing is that these devices also do an "off network" image backup as an automatic function. It was this backup that saved our bacon.
We restored from the backup and didnt contqact the hackers.

Since then, I have purchased another NAS to store the "offline" images so we are away again, but as I speak, I bet there are lots of people out there figuring out how to break into these "offline" type of backups.
This is a bit of a commercial solution, but sorry, I just dont trust anything in the cloud after what happened to us. So Google Drive, Picassa, Icloud, no, not for me. Off line storage is, for me , the only way to go
Jim

Periodically taking a backup to somewhere offsite can also save you some grief.

Well, I have taken thousands of photos and the digital ones are in the computer - somewhere.

As we never look at them it doesn't matter where they are, does it?

The older ones are in albums, but where the albums are is anyone's guess.

Paul