Like most (all?) families, we take tons of photos and videos.

Mostly of our kids. Mostly on holidays. And we typically holiday 1-2 months per year.

Therefore, we have hundreds of new photos each year.

I back-up our family photos once every year or two. This involves:

  1. Syncing photos from both my and my wife’s phones with the Photo app on my workstation
  2. Exporting all new photos (since last update) to a folder.
  3. Zip the folder of photos
  4. Upload to S3.

Therefore, we have 3 versions of the photos: the phones, my workstation, and the cloud.

I expect catastrophic loss at some point, so the backup process continues, typically executed in Q4 of a given year.

Now, when I’m old, I want to look at photos of my family in the “good years”. When the kids and we were young. I also expect my wife will want this, but I’m not sure. It’s was not really part of their family culture when she grew up.

When old, the tech will have changed. It might be hard. I might be impatient.

Therefore, I print the “best” ~250 photos from each year and put them in a physical album.

I expect that the physical photo albums will all that I will be left when old.

Tech fails. Photo albums “just work”.

Therefore, I take this seriously and print photos around photo backup time every 1-2 years.

This involves

  1. Selecting the photos.
  2. Exporting to a folder.
  3. Uploading to a printing service.
  4. Collect prints and put into an album “in order”.

I use cheap 500-photo albums from Amazon and am steadily filling a shelf in the bookshelf.

I also zip this “album” version of the photos and upload to S3. Zips can corrupt. Redundancy is cheap and good.

This pace will slow as the kids grow and holiday with us less over time.

This all could be simpler.

  • Push backups to an external HDD as well.
  • Sync from phone to cloud.
  • AI-select photos by event and interestingness.
  • Print photo book rather than prints.

But this works for now, and for the next ~10 years.

What do other people do? What do normals do?

I suspect nothing.

I suspect a phone is lost and that’s it. Photos lost.

How sad.