I'm searching for the best way to organize photos and videos on my soon to arrive MacBook Air which has a Thunderbolt 3 port. My thought is to utilize many smaller capacity thumb drives (opposed to one large one) with each one being its own album, ie "vacations/travel 2020", "gun images", etc. It's been suggested that I can buy a dedicated external hard drive and keep moving them over to it but for me I think having them each on their thumb drive will be better. Any of you do this?

What I'm trying to determine is the best thumb drives to buy? Will I need an adapter to connect them to my computer or will they plug directly in?

I’d prefer an SSD in an external enclosure because I believe thumb drives to be less reliable.

To answer your question about interface, you will need a USB-A to USB-C adaptor. Or once again, get an external drive enclosure that already has a Thunderbolt 3 port.

https://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/ENVPROC2N00/

Something like this. Get any M.2 drive and you’re all set. You could also use it as a second boot drive. This would be much faster than using USB-A thumb drives, and would probably be cheaper per GB.

What about just transferring to SD cards via a USB type c to SD card adapter?


So https://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/ENVPROC2N00/ is just the enclosure then I would buy the storage separately?

I like thumbdrives, use them all of the time since I don't use cloud servers. I usually carry 3-4 different ones and frankly never had one go bad. In fact I still have my "lucky" 1 gig drive that I bought 7 years ago and it works fine. My current one that I use a lot is a 64 gig USB 3.0 San Disk one that has both USB and USB-C connectors. I format my drives exFat, compatible with PCs and Macs.But I still use an external drive to backup my main desktop.

https://www.amazon.com/SanDisk...84986133&sr=8-4&th=1

oddball that's what I was thinking of, separate and affordable storage at about $10 each. Thanks.

To answer your question: Sandisk, Crucial, Western Digital are all reputable brands.

Many concerns come to mind. Chief among them are (1)NO backups (2)electronic failure of that thumbdrive and (3)physical loss / damage.

The art of organizing images has been accomplished with library albums, entitled as you suggest. Google Photos can also perform face recognition and organize images by person named. No, you don't have to name your daughter or son by their actual name, you can give them names only you know to ensure privacy.

Cloud storage in Apple or Google or Adobe or Amazon is free and paid, depending on your needs.

OK I may want to rethink how I want to organize and save photos because I have too many now on my phone and laptop.

I recently used some old hardware mixed in with some new parts to make a FreeNAS server so that everyone can backup their images to it and also everyone can have access to everyone else's images.

While moving some images from my wife's thumb drives to the NAS, I found that some of the thumb drives failed in one way or another. Some just had some corrupted files and another wouldn't mount at all. I wouldn't trust thumb drives to store important files.

quote:

Originally posted by ridewv:
OK I may want to rethink how I want to organize and save photos because I have too many now on my phone and laptop.

Do you have an iPhone in addition to a Mac? You can store 50GB of photos (or anything) on iCloud for $.99 per month. I have 18,000+ photos stored in my iCloud account and they are sync'd to my iPhone, iPad and Macs. In addition to automatic backup to iCloud anytime you take a picture with your camera, you can get a less expensive iPhone with smaller storage capacity because you aren't storing your pictures on your phone.

In a thread of mine in the pistol section, I stated how annoying it is when I say that I am looking for "abc" and people chime in to tell me that "xyz" is better.

So that said, I am going to ask whether you have considered "xyz."

If you are a Prime member, then "Amazon photos" is free. Unlimited photo storage, you can organize in folders, apps are available so that you can access your photos from just about any computer, smartphone, or tablet, all at no cost other than your regular Prime subscription.

OK thanks guys maybe a cloud is an option. But say Amazon starts charging or Apple raises prices, etc., how easy is it to remove them all (lots) onto your own SSD?

quote:

Originally posted by ridewv:
OK thanks guys maybe a cloud is an option. But say Amazon starts charging or Apple raises prices, etc., how easy is it to remove them all (lots) onto your own SSD?

You can download them at any time from cloud storage to your SSD.

 
Personally, I would get tired very quickly of swapping thumb drives back and forth.
 
I would get a nice little external drive case, like this $35 Oyen Digital MiniPro USB-C, which is compatible with the latest of the USB standards (USB 3.1 Gen2) and which will plug into your TB3 port with the included cable. Buy the enclosure only option. Then pick out a SATA SSD to put inside it. I used to prefer Samsung as the top pick, but since Crucial has switched to a new controller for their MX500 series drives, they are every bit as good, and cheaper. A 1TB Crucial MX500 SSD is $120, a 2TB $230. You could even partition it and use it as a bootable backup for your main internal drive.

Thanks Henry and everyone, I’m going to look into something like that now.

You’ll need the AV dongle to be able to use the thumb drive

https://www.bestbuy.com/site/a...dfD_BwE&gclsrc=aw.ds

I have one of these

https://shop.westerndigital.co...ndisk-ixpand-usb-3-0

3-2-1 + 1

3 copies.

2 distinct storage containers.

1 in a separate location.

+

1 copy that is air-gapped.

For me and my photos, that looks like 1 copy on my computer, 1 copy in my NAS, and 1 in the cloud. PLUS, one additional copy on an external USB drive NOT connected to anything else.