Let’s face it, we take a LOT of pictures. In fact, every 2 minutes today we take as many pictures as all of humanity took in the 1800s. The difference is now we store them on our computers, rarely viewing, editing, or sending them more than once. Should we really have to carry around 100GB or so worth of pictures with us at all times? What do you do when you actually have more photos than what your regular machine can store? iPhoto forces you to keep those pictures on the same machine or go through an elaborate archival process. Picasa forces you to store your photos in Google storage or again makes you jump through archival hoops.
We have an answer! Today, I’m going to show how you can easily manage all of your pictures without taking up space on your computer or having to pay for cloud storage.
Step 1: Store all of your pictures on odrive.
odrive is easy to set up if you haven’t done so already. Just install the odrive gateway on a spare computer. You can either do this on a computer that already has all the photos, or load them afterwards. odrive turns that spare computer into your own private dropbox, where you can easily browse through thousands of your pictures without downloading the actual data. You can invite others to your dropbox as well.
Below for example, I have put our company’s holiday party photos in odrive. We organize photos by event, creating a new subfolder for each event. For larger collections, you may want to create folders for each month or year.
Step 2: In a photo manager of your choice, point the application to the location of your odrive folder.
There are a lot of great free or low cost photo management applications out there, but for this example, I’m going to use Phototheca on my Windows laptop (Pixa for Mac is similar, with very cool tagging and workflow capabilities). You can easily manage photos in your Phototheca library by pointing the application to your odrive folder, and all of your photos from that particular folder will appear in thumbnail view. What Phototheca does is create a thumbnail of your image and capture all the metadata (like image dimensions), so you can then manage your photos without touching the actual files.
Step 3. Collapse odrive folders to save space on your computer
If you don’t want to view a folder any longer and want to save some space on your computer, all you have to do is go to the odrive folder, right-click, and select “collapse folder.” This removes the data from your local machine, but leaves a reference so you can double-click or “expand” to retrieve the data at any time. You could also do this to all the photo folders you have in odrive and just expand the ones you need as you need them. For example, if you have multiple years of photos (like we all do), you can just leave one expanded and have the rest “collapsed.”
4. View, browse, and manage – without taking up space!
Phototheca will still allow you to view, browse and organize your “unsynced” pictures (and your synced photos as well). You can literally manage terabytes of photos this way on your laptop. Phototheca and odrive take up 85% less capacity than the full sized photos.
If you need to view the original photos again in full resolution, simply go to the appropriate odrive folder, right-click, and “sync all files.”
Now you’re all set! With odrive and your photo management application, you can organize and view all of your pictures from anywhere, without taking up your precious computer space! In fact, you can now manage more photos than you have space for on your computer!
Give odrive a try for yourself to see how you can keep all your beloved pictures safe and available while using almost no space on your computer!
-Michelle
@michelleajuria
