If you're like many other parents and grandparents, you've taken thousands of photos as the children have grown up. Losing them to a computer crash or theft would be disastrous, which is why I'm the pest in the garden who bellows the three most important words in computing: Backup! Backup! Backup!
If all our photos were neatly labeled and filed in the Pictures folder of our PCs, backing up to an external flash drive would be easy enough. But _ I speak for myself _ I have folders full of photos on my desktop, too. Someday I'm going to organize them, but for now, they reside nilly-willy on different parts of my computer. Nonetheless, they must be backed up.
Picture Keeper, which looks and acts like a thumb drive, will back up all your photos _ I have nearly 5,000 on my PC and Mac and countless others on my iPhone. All models of Picture Keeper work in much the same way. Insert one end of the USB thumb drive into the PC or smartphone, click on Start Backup, and watch a flying gallery of each photo as it backs up. There's no software to install; the program resides on the thumb drive itself. Picture Keeper will search for photos in obvious places _ Pictures, Documents and Desktop _ and it will skip duplicates. You can stop the gallery when you see a photo you like.
I bought the 8-gigabyte version of Picture Keeper for about $20; larger ones are available _ and recommended _ as are models that back up photos from Android and Apple smartphones. The Apple version starts at about $80 and tops off with a 64-gigabyte version for $120. Keep in mind that digital photos that are taken with DSL cameras tend to be large _ several megabytes each in some cases _ but I was able to back up most of my important photos onto the 8-gigabyte drive.
Photos can be shared by email or Facebook, and they can be printed at home or sent to granddad, who has a super color printer. However, frustration set in when I found that my initial backup found hundreds of clipart files, and I couldn't figure out how to skip them. The interface is fairly intuitive, but I doubt if someone who is inexperienced with computers could figure it out easily without reading every FAQ (frequently asked questions).
Once I got the hang of it, I could choose individual photos to turn into a picture book, or simply send them to others via email. But it soon became tiring as I tried to find specific photos as they flashed by.
If you're well organized, you probably can copy your photos onto a thumb drive, but if you don't mind a bit of a learning curve, Picture Keeper will help you find the keepers among the rejects.
For more information: www.picturekeeper.com
