Globally, we receive more than 1 trillion photos per year, according to Increase on research, with the average American taking about 1,000 photos a year. Although most of these photos are rarely reviewed, they can still hold special memories.
Recently, I told my cousin about a photo of our parents clumsily standing in front of my Christmas tree, unaware that their picture was being taken. As I described it, my cousin wanted to see it, and so did I – I realized I hadn’t been keeping an eye on it for years. I had assumed it was in one of the dozens of photo albums in my living room, but I quickly realized this photo, along with hundreds of others from my daughter’s childhood, was on one of the two my retired laptop.
I’m willing to bet you have memories like this too, photos stashed in your old hard drive or a laptop you haven’t used in years gathering dust in the back of your closet. friend. Like me, you probably took these pictures before you had a smartphone. I have carefully downloaded every photo from my digital camera to my laptop.
I figured the only way to move those photos was to manually drag them onto a USB drive — a project I started regularly but never finished — even during the pandemic. It’s as tedious as downloading songs from CDs to your iPod.
Turns out you’re not alone. “Using a flash drive is the most common and simplest method, but also the most time consuming,” said Nicci Trovinger, product marketing manager for Windows at Microsoft.
My situation is not unique. Jessica Carrell, co-founder of AnySoftwareTools, a technology website that provides computer tricks and how-to instructions. “Many of us don’t realize that there are precious data stored in our old laptops.”
Luckily, there are easier methods to recover those old photos — and save them so you can share them with friends and family today. Here are some of them.
Problem: Your old laptop is too old to have built-in access to the cloud.
Solution: If your laptop has an Internet connection, you can upload files from your laptop to an image hosting platform. such as Dropbox or Shutterfly.
“Usually, the most convenient way to sync files from your laptop is with a platform like OneDrive or Dropbox, because of those services,” says Sean Fortner, cloud engineer at an IT services company. This provides an application that you can download to your computer. Theorem. These apps allow for faster upload speeds, as you can bulk import photos into folders and move multiple files at once.
Problem: The operating system on your laptop is too old to support the photo hosting app or service you want to use.
Solution: You may need to manually download and install the latest software updates for your old laptop first.
Even if it’s been several years since you updated your operating system, there’s a high chance you’ll be able to update your operating system to support the photos app, says Fortner. Even if you don’t update to the latest operating system version on your old computer, all you may need are the security updates and patches needed to install the service.
