JohnR Loc: The Gates of Hell

Partly this depends on which app you use for downloading and editing your photos. Apples Photos for instance stores the original photos in a library. You can search for these and then copy to an external drive - a bit time consuming. Time Machine is very very good for backing up your whole OS including whichever apps you use and your photos. Its benefit is in restoring everything when you change to a new machine.

PHRubin Loc: Nashville TN USA

FWIW - I use an external hard drive and 2 cloud services (Amazon Photo{comes with Prime} and Carbonite). I also use one web page for display/storage (Smugmug). For the hard drive I use a program called SyncBack which can be set to backup or synchronize. It can also run in background on a user set schedule.

pt17 Loc: San Francisco, CA

How come no one has mentioned CDs or DVDs?
I have photos stored on CDs from over 25 years ago and they still boot up just fine.

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

Because they are not reliable media for long term retention of data, despite your anecdotal experience (and they are too small). If you want to use optical media, let me suggest MDisks which can be recorded/played by any BluRay/MDisk drive, last virtually forever, and have max capacities of 100GB last time I looked.

suznmari Loc: Woodstock, IL

Thank you ALL for the information. I am currently sorting through all the excellent responses to decide which method to use. It will be the most uncomplicated route given my habit of quitting when things get too complicated. The photos are all in my Iphoto library and like I probably mentioned too tangled up with duplicates, raw, and jpeg both. Again, thanks SO MUCH! I will update how it went when I get the project of getting the photos organized, duplicates deleted, and off my computer, in case anyone is curious.

suznmari Loc: Woodstock, IL

Thank you!

suznmari Loc: Woodstock, IL

Thanks!

suznmari Loc: Woodstock, IL

Thank you JohnR!

DirtFarmer Loc: Escaped from the NYC area, back to MA

I was in a similar situation several years ago. I had about 65K images on my computer and a lot of them were duplicates and editing versions. I wanted to get them organized. I was using Lightroom and just starting to organize things that way.

The first thing I did was to divide the problem up. I split the photopile up into small groups defined by year. That way I could go through a limited number of photos and sort them, deleting duplicates and incomplete edits. Since I was using Lightroom I also added keywords to all of them. I tried to put the name of everyone in a photo into the keywords for that photo. It made it really useful when I needed to find photos of a particular person later. When I finished a year's worth of photos I went on to the next year.

When I got through all the years I just left them in folders organized by year. I had done the sorting using Lightroom, so I just merged the catalogs into a master catalog. I got the 65K photos down to 18K. It's now up to 32K but it's organized so I can find things.

The other thing I did was to develop a consistent workflow to keep the new photos organized. When I download the photos I go through them and dump the real junk, then place keywords on all the rest. Putting names into the keywords is the most time consuming part, but the part that I find most useful in the long run.