Well, right now most of them are on flash drives, and I have them sorted by year I think. None of the drives is more than 16 gb.
My goals, and the main reason I bought this new iMac when most of my needs are handled with an iPad, is to put photos on here, and purge, only keeping the ones that are really worth keeping (I feel like with digital we tend to keep way more than necessary). I plan to make hard photo books with the favorites, and then store those and others I want to keep. I'd actually be okay putting them on a hard drive and then keeping the flash drives, but IDK how reasonable that is anymore.
I then have to tackle videos of my grandkids, which is gonna be a whole 'nuther ballgame, although I already have most sorted by kid onto flash drives as well. Thinking I'll do some sort of movie collection of the videos I have of each child and then figure out a good way to store that.
It's my summer project, but who am I kidding - it'll probably take me 2 years to get it all done. ;-p
Sounds like a good plan to me. I understand how big a job this is, but the iMac should make it efficient and enjoyable. I just received my new iMac as well and photo organizing will be a good project to tackle on it.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but it sounds like you have your photos on thumb drives and nowhere else. If that is the case, you definitely need to get an external drive to backup these photos ASAP. You could probably get away with a 500gb model, but maybe a 1tb would be good for future storage.
I found a Sandisk on Costco.com for $100 (if you are a member), otherwise the Samsung T7 runs about double the speed of the Sandisk I mentioned, but is around $170. You will need a usb-a to usb-c adapter if you don’t already have one to connect the thumb drives to the iMac so you can transfer to the ssd.
If you want to keep the thumb drives, they could serve as a second backup, but they transfer at a fraction of the speed of an ssd, so they’re not very practical — and they may be more prone to failure. If you decide to ditch the thumb drives, just get two of the same ssd you choose so you have a redundant backup.
I hope this is helpful. Please feel free to ask any other questions, and maybe others will share their thoughts as well.
EDIT: From reading another post, I see you plan to keep the photos on the iMac and iCloud, plus have the hard backups. In this case, it isn’t necessary to have two ssd backups as I suggested. Also, you probably have either the 50gb or 200gb iCloud plan, and your iMac is 256gb, so a 1tb ssd might be overkill, but it depends on how many backups you want to store on it.
