Most people enjoy capturing photos, but few take any pleasure in the labor-intensive task of getting them into any kind of order on computers or other devices. However, just as spring cleaning your house or emptying the McDonald's wrappers out of your footwell can be a rewarding and cathartic experience -- as well as a necessary one -- so too can be cleaning up the similarly messy pile of photos stuffed haphazardly on your PC.
Where to store your photos
How are your photos currently stored? Randomly crammed into your pictures folder? Wadded onto an external hard drive? Burned onto a billion DVDs? A drawer full of assorted SD cards mixed with paper clips, pencils, and other detritus? Or do you just have them in the phone or camera that was used to capture them?
Wherever your photos are, your first step should be figuring out where they should be. I recommend an external drive, whether a hard drive, solid-state drive, or a larger drive array. You could keep them on an internal hard drive or SSD, but there’s more that can go wrong with a laptop, desktop, or mobile device, and it’s not always easy to recover your photos if something goes wrong. An external storage solution is more secure and can be easily shared between different devices.
