All about my DPH (Digital Photo Hub)

14 Aug All about my DPH (Digital Photo Hub)

In our last post we explained what a DPH (Digital Photo Hub) was. If you missed it, we recommend you pop over for a read, it was an important one!

As promised this time we are giving you a real life example of how I chose my DPH and how I use it.

To recap from the last post – it was recommended that you use the following criteria for choosing your DPH.

My DPH is on one of the main internal drives of my PC desktop. Let’s take a look at how I applied the criteria in my choice;

• It’s dedicated – I am using the PICTURES Folder of an internal drive of my PC desktop. Within that folder is a manually managed folder structure.
• It’s intentional – I do not use or apply any automated sync or uploads to this location, I purposely add photo and video files to it myself – with intent!
• It’s accessible – this PC is in my home office and I can access it as long as I have power (aka it is not dependent on internet access)
• It is high capacity – I use this PC for work, the internal drive is dedicated to storing photos only (no program or system files) and has 2TB of space for me to use
• It’s durable – no chance of knocking this baby off the desk, the drive is embedded in the big chunky tower and kept behind a locked door in my office
• It’s predictable – as I said this is my work PC, unless I install an update (which I would by all means read up on before hand) then I know exactly how I expect it to operate.

As you can see it is quite simple and straightforward to choose your DPH location if you apply the criteria.

How do I use my DPH? First let look at my photo inputs;

1. my smart phone
2. my husband’s smart phone
3. our family point and shoot camera
4. our family DSLR
5. shared photos from family and friends from social media or email

How do I get each of the above input types into my DPH?

1. I connect my smart phone the old fashioned way with the USB cable straight to my desktop computer (I find it the fastest transfer)
2. Similar with hubby’s smart phone, I connect via the USB cable
3. Again I use the USB cable to connect the point and shoot camera
4. though I rarely use the DSLR when I do again I use the USB cable as opposed to SD card reader (though using an SD card reader can be faster)
5. shared social media photos I usually save to my phone as I see the ones I like and as such they are captured in my DPH when I connect my phone.

Did you see a pattern? In all the instances I use the USB cable and I navigate to the device in question and COPY from that location and then PASTE into the manually managed folders of my DPH. Once arranged neatly in my DPH I can simply connect my external hard drive (EHD) and with a few simple clicks make a backup copy of my entire photo collection to be stored in another location for safekeeping.

So what are you waiting for?  Have you created a DPH of your own yet?