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The OP is asking about storage of photos for viewing. Yet there's 23 mentions of the word “backup” on just the first page. It’s a storage question. Taken over by zealots who don’t understand storage means more than backups. It’s happens over and over again on storage discussions. Yes, I also do clones, as well as Time Machine, as well as offsite. It’s pretty basic stuff. I don’t feel it’s worth viewing every OP as a neophyte that needs counseling on backups.
Add another 4 mentions of the word “backup”.
Someone needs to queue that clip of Family Guy where the girlfriend was shoving her small dog in the face of a prospective BF over and over until she jams it down his throat, lol. I guess I'm one of the guilty ones, while I mentioned iCloud, I too got caught up in the backup fever.
There we go - found it!
Think maybe the primary problem is in your first sentence - "I have years of photos and videos on an external hard drive." and you are overwhelmed by the content. May I suggest the following, buy a used MacBook Pro (there should be many on the market due to the emergence of the M1 chip), get a program like Photo Mechanic to cull out the "junk" and categorize your photo collection. Great Covid project.
This is a FWIW.
I've been going through my older photos. Picking the ones I really like and putting copies into slide shows. The copies are reduced in size, maximum 1200 pixels wide or 825 pixels high. This will depend on how you display them. Also I've taken the time to play with the balances and so on. Preview is a great app to use for the selection process, you can easily have 50+ images at a time stacked in Preview. See one you like and drag it from Preview to your editing app, slave away and then do a 'Save As' or 'Export' to your Slides folder.
As an example for 2008 I had 288 images of which 54 made it into slide shows. The originals take up a modest 655MB of disc space as these were 7MP jpegs. The slideshow occupies a meager 29MB. Obviously the economy will improve by orders of magnitude when we talk about RAW images or even jpegs getting into the 10-20MP range.
Those early years I seldom took more than one image of a subject due to the tiny size of my SD cards. As my SDs got much larger I often took as many as half a dozen so that means even further disc savings, if you keep them all (I don't).
Point is picking the best and reducing the size, will make it much easier to store locally. The originals can continue to safely reside on external drives. There are a ton of ways to do this, find one and as others suggested think of it as a Covid project. Gnaw away for an hour or two a day and you will be amazed at the progress you make.
BTW I love Graphic Converter for a quick way to rename and index big batches of images. It can pull dates from the EXIF file and add an index number, doing a folder of 50 images in less than 2 seconds. My naming convention is MMDDYY_Index#. I maintain the year and Index# as the first part of the name when I save it as a slide. This makes it really easy to find the original should I ever want to do something else with it.
I've been going through my older photos. Picking the ones I really like and putting copies into slide shows. The copies are reduced in size, maximum 1200 pixels wide or 825 pixels high. This will depend on how you display them. Also I've taken the time to play with the balances and so on. Preview is a great app to use for the selection process, you can easily have 50+ images at a time stacked in Preview. See one you like and drag it from Preview to your editing app, slave away and then do a 'Save As' or 'Export' to your Slides folder.
As an example for 2008 I had 288 images of which 54 made it into slide shows. The originals take up a modest 655MB of disc space as these were 7MP jpegs. The slideshow occupies a meager 29MB. Obviously the economy will improve by orders of magnitude when we talk about RAW images or even jpegs getting into the 10-20MP range.
Those early years I seldom took more than one image of a subject due to the tiny size of my SD cards. As my SDs got much larger I often took as many as half a dozen so that means even further disc savings, if you keep them all (I don't).
Point is picking the best and reducing the size, will make it much easier to store locally. The originals can continue to safely reside on external drives. There are a ton of ways to do this, find one and as others suggested think of it as a Covid project. Gnaw away for an hour or two a day and you will be amazed at the progress you make.
BTW I love Graphic Converter for a quick way to rename and index big batches of images. It can pull dates from the EXIF file and add an index number, doing a folder of 50 images in less than 2 seconds. My naming convention is MMDDYY_Index#. I maintain the year and Index# as the first part of the name when I save it as a slide. This makes it really easy to find the original should I ever want to do something else with it.
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The most simple and more economical solution for the OP is to get something like the Western Digital My Clound EX2. Provides private cloud access to your photos when you want them.
To all the backup zealots, you can get a second EX2 or EX4 and put it at a trusted location (friend/family/office) and they work together for off-site backup. Cheap and easy.
To all the backup zealots, you can get a second EX2 or EX4 and put it at a trusted location (friend/family/office) and they work together for off-site backup. Cheap and easy.
Forgive me for conflating storage with backups. You are correct that they are not the same.
What prompted my initial reply was a statement made in the OP’s second post:
“I also worry about relying solely on one hard drive which could fail.”
I perhaps read too much into it, thinking that the OP was storing all photo and video assets on a single external drive. Which would not be a great idea.
Apologies if I derailed the thread.
I would still posit that a NAS could be a good solution as it allows multiple devices to access the shared drive and can also allow remote access if configured correctly. I’m not an IT expert and only have experience with my Synology NAS, but it was fairly easy/painless to setup. It comes with free software to allow multiple uses (like photo sharing or music streaming). Haven’t played with the software options since they aren’t important for my use case. But they might work for the OP.
I’m not positive a NAS would meet all of the OP’s needs (perhaps it would, perhaps it wouldn’t—I’m getting outside my area of expertise and would appreciate comments from those with more experience).
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