External Hard Drive or Online Photo Storage?

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runner12345

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I am a photographer who will be traveling through Europe soon and will be taking thousands of pictures..
I will have my laptop with me, however, I don't want to slow it down and instead want to store my photographs elsewhere.
ALSO, I have about 20,000 photographs that I would like to be stored somewhere other than just my computer ( just in case of failure, fire, et cetera)

My question is, for these two purposes, should I invest in a a large portable external hard drive ( ~1 tb) or a online photo storage?

What do you think the pros and cons are of both options?

External Hard Drive CONS: you will not always have access to, and may fail and I'll lose all my precious photographs
External Hard Drive PROS: somewhat inexpensive, one upfront fee..

Online Photo Storage PROS: access anywhere as long as I have internet, smaller chance of failing/losing pictures
CONS: expensive? is it really reliable? I hear backing up files is difficult sometimes..

What do you guys think??
Thanks so much beforehand, I really really appreciate it!
 
Make sure that you look carefully into the copyright details surrounding online hosting. In some cases sites can claim ownership of your work when you upload them. If it was an account that you were paying for though I assume that this wouldn't be the case.

Something else to take into consideration is the time needed to upload images to sites. If you're a professional photographer, you're probably saving your pictures at very high resolutions and as such you have images that are several MB's each. Uploading these could take half a minute, then multiply that by 20,000.

I personally would much prefer the external hard drive. But if this is your livelihood, I would take a middle of the road approach. Sure, sign up for the online hosting if you have a decent internet connection and won't be sitting for hours uploading only a dozen pictures, but also burn them to physical media that is in your possession. By this I mean DVD's.

That way you could store 4GB of images per disc, and they are virtually fail proof so long as you keep them free of scratches.

If photography is your livelihood, I would not trust my images to only one form of storage, but I would back it up in as many places as possible. Online storage is pretty reliable, but again it's out of your control when you upload it. It's always smart to have some way of physically holding onto the images, so I would opt for both an external hard drive and DVD backups personally.
 
Putting pictures on your laptop won't slow it down. Pictures on your laptop will be fine, but get an external hard disk in case so you have two places. Do both if you are really worried.
 
Each image is what 1-2MB If good quality ... 100kb if Regular JPG? I recommend using Photobucket.com gives you 1GB of FREE space or 10GB if you pay $32 for a whole year. Seriously you don't need an external hard drive which is really expensive
 
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