It has happened to every modern traveler. First, your phone runs out of space for any more of your travel photos. So you move them to the cloud. Then you need to buy more space in the cloud, soon that’s not enough either. Ultimately, you’re left with too many photos to handle that you never even actually look at!
The good news is that there are ways to keep your old travel photos without having to print them out in an album. From building a free photography website to learning how to delete duplicates en masse, you can get your unwieldy photo collection under control. With website builders like Wix, creating a website to share your travel photos is now easier than ever. Let’s speak about the solutions available to you.
Cleaning Up Your Collection
Before you start finding a place to keep and share your photos, we need to talk about cleaning up your collection. The reality is that we take thousands of photos, many of them duplicates, and because of the sheer number we end up never looking at any of them. Still, we don’t want to delete them because we know that one day we’ll want to reminisce.
The good news is that, in today’s world, you don’t have to go through your photos deleting each duplicate manually. On the contrary, you can use apps like Google Photos to do this for you. They will clean up your collection using their sophisticated algorithms. They will show you what they suggest deleting and you can save the few good photos that make it through.
They also categorise your photos by place and date, making it easy to create albums out of specific trips, and even specific legs of each trip.
This is not just a matter of space. It makes your unwieldy collection much easier to navigate, giving you the chance to actually peruse through your old photos from time to time without having to scroll through endless duds.
Create a Website
Creating a website entirely for your travel photos may feel a bit indulgent – and it is! In the best possible way. You are taking the time to collect your memories and display them in a space that is easy to enjoy. You can create different pages for different trips, and include slideshows, individual albums, and much more.
The great thing about creating a website is that it is now easy to share with everyone else who went on the trip. You can grant them access to add their own photos as well, so that you get everyone’s best shots.
While the cloud is great, you generally don’t want to share your login details with everyone. Having a dedicated website to your travel photos lets you share without compromising the security of everything else you keep in the cloud.
Use An External Hard Drive
If you don’t want to create a whole website for your travel photography, there are other ways to store all of your photos, no matter how hefty they get. You don’t need to use the cloud, but can rather store them on an external hard drive. External hard drives are fairly cheap these days, and you can get a terabyte for under $30.
However, this is far from an ideal solution. While it will provide great storage for your photos, it is nonetheless susceptible to wear and tear which, in today’s digital world, makes it incredibly old-fashioned. Furthermore, every time you want to see these photos, you will have to get your external hard drive out and plug it into your computer.
Your computer itself might have space for your photos, but it is unlikely that you want to take up too much space that could be used for software. It is also a bit outdated, considering that most of what we save on our computers goes into the cloud for backup anyway.
Make Hard Decisions
Finally, if you still find your travel photos unwieldy, you may have to make some tough decisions. Look at your travel photos and decide which ones you actually think you’ll look at in the future. This may exclude many landscape photos and photos of things you can find online. As the world turns, better photographs than your own will be taken! They won’t have the same sentimentality, but your photos are likely to sit unseen indefinitely.
This way, you end up with photos that are truly yours – in that they have you and your loved ones in them. They are not just photos of a place you visited, but memories. Instead of having a huge amount of clutter in your photo collection, you have albums that you go back to time and time again.
