This post is going up a little later than I’d hoped but better later than never! At year’s end (usually New Year’s Eve) I take stock of how many photos I’ve taken in the past year. In 2019, I took a whopping 26832 photos! Last year my final count was 16692. I took 10,000 more photos in 2019, than I did in 2018!
Honestly, I’m quite surprised about that total. But looking back we did take several trips and whenever we go on vacation my photo taking gets even more prolific than normal. We took trips to the Bahamas, New York and California. Our California trip included Disneyland. I’ve said it before and it still holds true – any trip with Disney in the name inevitably quadruples the normal number of pics I take on vacation! We also had a bunch of milestone birthdays and anniversaries last year so that meant a lot more celebrating with family and friends. The 2019 year in review calendars I made for 2020, were jammed packed with great memories.
I would also attribute the increase in my photo taking to my garden. In the last couple years I’ve become an avid gardener. I not only enjoy photographing flowers, butterflies and nature in general, my photography has become a tool in planning my garden and documenting its progress – both successes and failures. I love taking photos showing the progression of the seasons and it also helps me keep track of where I planted my spring bulbs! The following photos are all taken in my garden. I smile thinking about all the blooms that hopefully should be popping up in a couple months.
The transition to the new year also is a time when I traditionally take stock of my backups. My annual “Public Service Announcement” to everyone is to make sure you have at least 2 backups of your photos – one ideally offsite. I’ve written pretty extensively on my backup process so please check out the links if you’re interesting in finding out more detail. I have 5 backups: 1) iCloud for my iPhone photos; 2) Software that automatically clones the main drive where I store my main photo database (Carbon Copy); 3) Time Machine (Mac) which is an auto backup of #2 and more; 4) CrashPlan – automatic offsite Cloud backup of my photo files and other important files; 5) Manual download of iPhone photos and videos to a second computer in Photos (the photo management software that comes with Mac computers). One note about this, is notice how many of them are automated (4 out of 5 backups occur automatically) – once you set it up, you shouldn’t have to fiddle with it much. I know it can be a tedious thing to think about backups – we all have so many other things to do – so going the automatic route is best. You’ll be so relieved if your hard drive crashes and you have a back up. Did you know that hard drives have an average lifespan of of only 3 to 5 years? I didn’t know that until I had one fail on me. I’ve probably had at least 3 hard drive failures over the years and luckily I’ve had a secondary backup.
Besides the photos you take with your phone or digital camera, don’t forget to back up your old photos that were taken on film, especially family heirlooms. I have a long term project that’s ongoing to scan all of my old paper photos so that I have a digital backup of them. I’ve already completed a lot of my childhood photos and I’m trying to move onto photos from college and beyond. To make that task easier, several years back I bought a scanner with an automatic feeder which is a huge timesaver. It’s the Fujitsu ScanSnap iX500 which I purchased on Amazon. There’s a newer model of the scanner I have on Amazon called the Fujitsu ScanSnap iX1500. With it you can stack photos of the same size into the feeder and it will scan them for you. I also use it to scan receipts and any other paper documents. I still have a flatbed scanner for things that cannot be fed.
One last thing I recommend backing up are those old videotapes. About 10 years ago I did a big project where I digitized some clips from old VHS tapes – home movies of my childhood. Fast forward to today, I was digging through some mini DV tapes which I didn’t have time to digitize and now I realize they’ve deteriorated quite a bit and they may not be recoverable. I’m pretty disappointed that I didn’t get to those sooner. I might try to bring a few of the more important tapes to a local company to see if they can recover anything on them. It’s worth a try as their equipment will be much better than my old camcorder and part of the problem could be my old equipment. Just to give you an idea, the cost of digitizing one videotape at this local business is about $35.00. I feel better giving the business to a local company and I also feel better about walking it in versus putting an irreplaceable tape in the mail.
On a final note, I have some exciting news. Photobookgirl is turning 10 at the end of this month and I have a fabulous GIVEAWAY which will start on Friday, February 28, 2020, so be sure to visit my blog that day! I have two awesome prizes to share! Thank you as always for your readership. I hope you’ve had a chance to take a look back at your photos from the past year.
I’d love to hear in the comments – how many photos did you take in 2019?
