Tag Archives: digital memories

Cleaning Up and Organizing Your Digital Life

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Today’s consumer spends an inordinate amount of time taking pictures and videos and sharing them across a spectrum of social networks. Over time, consumers create a body of work that at some point will get out of hand.

There will be videos and photos on your smartphone, camcorder and regular camera. Of course, days add up to weeks; weeks up to months; and, months up to years. This translates into thousands of digital memories in a variety of places that are unorganized and at times very hard to find.

To help prevent digital organization headaches, here are a few tips:

Find A Home for Those Memories
Our smartphones, memory cards and computers can only hold so many pictures and videos. External hard drives are a great way to eliminate digital clutter, especially those with USB 3.0 technology. Take a look at the Western Digital My Passport 2TB hard drive. It’s compact and packs a ton of space for roughly $300. Best part, it’ll allow you to have all your digital memories in one location that’s portable if it needs to be.

File Organization Should be a Priority
Once you have your external hard drive, you have to get the digital memories on to the device in a manner that will allow you to find them later on. You don’t want to spend hours looking for that one photo from Uncle Bob’s birthday that was taken three years ago. My suggestion is to file your photos and videos by year, month, date and then subject matter. For example, 2012 / July / 06-04 / July 4th Festivities.

Additionally, if you shoot in RAW format (digital negative), separate those files from your JPEGs, which are the photos that are in a social sharing friendly format. This will allow you to separate your digital “film” from the photos themselves.

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Four Ways to Streamline Your Digital Content Securely

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We live in a digital world. Consumers of all ages are creating memories via photos and videos that are snapped every second and shared across social networks constantly.

However, what most of us don’t think about is how we treat these digital memories and how precious they are until our smartphone is lost; our digital camera is stolen; or, those memory cards find their way into the pool. Unfortunately, consumers tend to feel that their digital memories will “always” be there for them. Of course, that’s not the case and to help you secure those memories, here are five simple tips:

1. Beef Up Your Storage: External hard drives have come a long way. They used to be very expensive and a novelty item. These days, they are very cost effective and the technology has come so far that you can literally store your child’s entire digital life on a single drive.

Take the Western Digital My Passport 2TB hard drive. It’s compact and packs a ton of space for roughly $300. Using an external drive like the Western Digital My Passport will allow you to save all your digital memories as well as have them travel with you to the office, on vacation, etc.

2. Keep Your Head in the Cloud: Cloud storage is another way to go. There are enough services out there — some paid, some free — that will allow you to upload your images online. The best part is that you can do this on the go, which is helpful for those times that you want to reference an image you took a couple of years ago, but didn’t want to “store” on your device.

3. Share with Limits: We often want to share our work with friends and family. However, there’s always the worry of people using your images against your will or exposing your personal images publicly. So, before you hit the share button, be sure to look at your privacy settings to know who can see your images. Additionally, if you are sharing publicly, be sure that you clearly state whatever copyright rules you’d like to follow, like Creative Commons for example. Lastly, devices with USB 3.0 will help you speed up your sharing efforts.

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