With such amazing technologies coming up in the 21st century, it has become very easy for people to travel and click pictures with a single smart device in their hand. Moreover, the increase in per capita income has also boosted the travel industry and people don’t shy away from planning a trip to their dream destination nowadays. To capture these memories, the smart device comes in handy to click different kinds of images like panorama, slow-mo, square box, etc. and the image filters further enhance the clicking experience. As per a statistic, one trillion plus photos were clicked in the year 2018.
Photos are precious and hence safeguarding them in this fickle world is tricky and tough. A technical error or a hacker either of them can be a reason for you to losing your pictures that you have clicked. Every now and then we hear news of hackers blackmailing people by posting their personal pictures online. No one wants to lose these precious and beautiful memories. Let’s understand some of the tips and tricks that will help you in safeguarding your collection of precious images.
- Switch off automatic backups: Everyone has multiple online accounts nowadays and these service providers’ backup each and every file that you store on their platform by default. For example, the pictures clicked on iPhone are stored on the phone and simultaneously uploaded on Apple’s iCloud. Even though these services are built on industry-standard technologies and security practices, they can be prone to a hacking attack. It is always better to turn off the automatic upload setting on your IOS or Android device until and unless you need the backup.
- Multiple backups: Once you are back from your trip or vacation or a photo-shoot you should immediately backup the images on two external drives. Make sure that both the hard drives are not connected to the same computer. So even if anything happens to your laptop or smartphone you have a backup copy of the photo database stored already. Encryption of the images folder is also a good option to safeguard and protect your images from online theft. You can use Mac’s FileVault or Microsoft’s BitLocker to encrypt the entire hard drive or the image folder as per your requirement.
- Strong Passwords: There are brute-force methods that can be used to detect passwords and hack online social media accounts. Once the password is cracked, the hacker will get direct access to all of your personal data in your profile and cloud storage. Sometimes you might even get a phishing email and if you open this email by mistake or click on the link sent, then your account is compromised immediately. Hence make sure that your password has letters, numbers, and special characters to make it strong and you spam any suspicious email that you get.
- Private settings in online profiles: The privacy settings in your social media profile decides the people who can view the pictures and images. You can restrict viewership as per your convenience and prevent your pictures from doing multiple rounds on the internet. If you wish to share the images with someone and it can’t be done personally, then you can you the private messaging apps to share them. These services encrypt the data before being transferred to other people.
- Using hi-end cameras: If you are a professional photographer and prefer to use DSLRs then losing images can impact your livelihood. First and foremost, you should turn off the default setting of clicking pictures without the presence of a memory card in the camera. The menu option has this mode setting in DSLRs. If buying a new DSLR, you can go for the one having two memory card slots so that the second slot can automatically start saving images in case the first one goes full. And never erase the memory card until you are a hundred percent sure that the images are correctly copied on multiple hard drives.
Lastly, don’t forget to have prints of your photos as well. While your phones can be changed, your hard disk can be damaged, printed photos if stored carefully, stay with you forever. During my last trip to Singapore, I got all of my photos printed from a service in Singapore. And guess what, they still make me relive those beautiful memories.
Internet theft and technical snags are very common nowadays and you can read more about these topics online. You can follow the above tricks and keep your precious images and photos safe. Don’t let it happen to you!