If you have lots of photos and/or videos, whether it’s professional, amateur or just an avid collector of family or hobby photos and footage you need Picture Keeper. Picture Keeper will help you save and organize your photos and free up valuable storage space on your computer.
With Father’s Day and summer holiday fun imminent for many, Picture Keeper will keep backups of all your photos, and if needed, free up your hard drive, so that you can actually remove all photos from there and keep them in the separate external PK drive.
*If you’re on a Mac, see that cautionary note at bottom.
Picture Keepers come in a variety of sizes, depending on your storage needs. We own two of the 320,000 images drives, and also a smaller thumbdrive style that holds up to 16,000 photos or 16GB of space.
I’m not a photographer… not even an amateur-aspiring-to-be-pro. My husband Coleman, and daughter Devani, both serve that role in our family. But for business, we are accumulating lots of photos and videos, both of which take up tons of space.
As you can see from this screenshot, my amply sized hard drive is almost out of storage space, which is causing my computer to run painfully slow and even lock up frequently, (two cold reboots today). Most of what’s taking the space, as indicated by the pink and yellow sections of the bar is in photos and “movies”, much of which are our Boomers Reinvented and My Trainer Fitness fitness photos and interviews.
One thing that’s super efficient about the Picture Keeper process is that these drives automatically eliminate duplicates (unless you tell it not to), and it’s smart enough to even detect duplicates with different names. Apparently PK monitors the text files that accompany all images and from that are able to determine which ones are valid.
Another thing it does is keeps tracks of duplicates even across devices. So let’s say you have three PK’s as I do in the photo above, the Picture Keepers are programmed to detect and images between devices via the text files stored on the hard drive of your computer. This also allows you to shift from one device to another if the first drive gets full. That means that even if you’re in the middle of a back up, if your first device gets full, the PK’s are now programmed to pause the backup and then resume it to a new drive.
Picture Keeper also has excellent customer support, easily accessible by chat, email or phone during regular office hours, so should you run into any problems, their CS will be there to help you.
If you buy it through one of the Amazon links above, we do receive a small compensation which helps us run this Boomers Reinvented site, or you can order directly from Picture Keeper, where we are not affiliates, and so receive no compensation. Whether you order from Amazon or direct from PK, their customer service department will serve you should you need them.
Whatever you do, be sure to protect your digital images and memories in safe storage and backup systems. We highly recommend Picture Keeper. Let us know if you use it and how you like it in comments and/or on our Facebook page and we’ll be glad to share it. . Or, if you’re using a different system that you really like, please let us know about that as well.
*CAUTION: IF YOU’RE ON A MAC like we are, you will not yet be able to search your Picture Keeper in your Finder window YET. Apparently the last two updates to Mac’s operating system has disabled the search function for NON-MAC external drives. E.g., I do my backups onto a ‘My Passport for Mac’ drive and it IS searchable.
Currently, the Picture Keepers are NOT searchable within Finder from your Mac, at least not without a workaround. (See more info on that from PK below).
So, you can search your PK drives, but you will need to do that from within PK by folders and files, so manually, versus just entering in a file name, tag or keyword in Finder, while it is that Macs are reportedly NOT indexing any external non-Mac drive.
That’s a huge disadvantage in using PK with a Mac. In fact, I’ve gone back to my Passport as a temporary holding space for images and videos. It won’t get rid of duplicates, but you can search by names, tags and keywords.
Here’s the link for the 1 TB Passport for Mac.
I’ll come back and update this when Picture Keeper resolves their Mac incompatibility issue, (if they can). Meanwhile, if anyone knows of a Picture Keeper-like-solution for Macs, let me know.
We’re avid Apple/Mac fans, but, like the sports team on a losing streak, they ARE disappointing on a number of fronts these days, and that’s a big one. SO… if you ARE on a Mac, here are some links for a fix that Picture Keeper support shared with us. Meanwhile, PK is also looking for their own work-around solution to build into their drives, (see the email below). We’ll keep you posted.
EMAIL from Picture Keeper Customer Support with Possible Solutions / Work-arounds:
LeAura,
Here is some information on the issue: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/6681402
and some official information from Apple: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201716
It seems that these fixes don’t always work, and as a result, several third party pieces of software have sprung up to fill the gap:
- http://apps.tempel.org/FindAnyFile/index.php
- https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/found/id527134927?mt=12&ign-mpt=uo%3D8
Now, I haven’t used any of this software. I can’t vouch for it personally. At best, I’d consider these a stop-gap solution until Apple actually solves the problem of indexing external drives.
In case that day never comes, we are also working to add a search feature to a future version of the Picture Keeper software (thanks, in large part, to your request.) I can’t give you a timeline on that, just yet, but be looking for it in a future update.
Thanks!
—
Andrew Roach
Picture Keeper Support