Picture Keeper is a very simple, yet powerful way to find and backup your digital photos. Just plug in the flash drive or external hard drive into a USB port on either your PC or Mac, and start Picture Keeper. Off it goes finding the photos scattered across your computer. It will even tell you where they are located so you can do some consolidating once you find them.
I like that it is really easy. Pop it in and let it run. You will find out how many jpegs are on your computer. You can refine your search under “Options”, including where Picture Keeper looks on your computer and what types of files it looks for and backs up (JPG,TIF, TIFF, GIF, BMP,PNG, even MOV, AVI and WMV under 100MB). On the first run Picture Keeper searches to find how many images you have. I knew I had over 43,000 in my personal Photo Vault. It was the other 52,000 that I was surprised to find! Many of these were Client files or things I copied or moved in order to email, use in a project or slide show. It’s easy to forget you have photos scattered and duplicated all over your hard drive. If you have more than one computer, you can plug Picture Keeper into each one to find and back up ALL your photos.
Picture Keeper comes in several sizes, the PK-4, PK-6, PK-8, PK-PRO, and downloadable software that you can put on your own external hard drive. The PK4 through 8 are flash drives and the PK-PRO is an external hard drive that come loaded with the Picture Keeper software. If you have more photos than will fit on one drive, Picture Keeper will tell you and all you need to do is plug in another PK drive and it continues where the last one left off. You use the same PK flash drive(s) to update each month. Picture Keeper will check to see what has changed since the last time you backed up and back up the changes.
Picture Keeper also has an app to get your photos off your iPhone, iPad and Android devices and onto your computer! This is sweet for not losing those pictures on your phone. It is so easy to forget about backing up your phone and tablet to your computer until something happens and it’s too late. I highly recommend this app and getting into the habit of moving your photos off your phone on a regular schedule!
The one thing I’m not thrilled with is that this is still a manual process. I love automation and not having to think about needing to do something. Picture Keeper will remind you when you need to back up by sending a reminder email. But you still need to put the flash or external hard drive into your computer(s) and run the program. You can then set them aside in a different place in your house or in another location for safe keeping.
Your backup system for your photos does need several redundancies, and Picture Keeper is an excellent choice for either on or off site backup. The flash drives are of high quality and I really like that you can download the software and put it on your own EHD if you want or need a larger drive than the PK-PRO. If you are looking for a simple-to-use backup for your photos, Picture Keeper is for you.
So what is your backup plan and how might this help you?
Picture Keeper links in this blog are affiliate links meaning I do receive a fee if you purchase through links on my page. All opinions are my own.
