I am what you typically would call an amateur photographer. most of my pictures is portraits of my kids. But once in a while I get to shoot some weddings and other events. One thing with newer DSLRs is that the RAW images takes up a lot of space.

Even though an external hard drive with a gazillion GB of storage isn’t that expensive now a days. The hustle of backing up to multiple hard drives just to have backups on your backups isn’t the most effective in my opinion.

I know that you can buy a Raid or a NAS and its all taken care of……if it doesn’t burn down with your house…
My solution to this is very simple using the latest sync client for Onedrive and Windows 10.

The process:

First of all. You should set up OneDrive on your device in advance to turn on the feature. To sign-in, open the OneDrive app from the Start Menu and follow the setup.

When all the above is sorted.

I unload all my images from the camera/SD card to my computer. I usually let the software sort the images in to Year-Month-Date so that the initial sorting is done for me.
When the first step is done I just go through the images to see which once to keep and which is better sorted in the trashcan.
When all the sorting and emptying is done I open my OneDrive folder on my computer and go to in my case “Bildbackup” (Picture Backup)

In “bildbackup” I have a multiple of folders representing years. In every year-folder I have the different months that I have been taking pictures.

This is my way of sorting. If you have multiple cameras, users, etc. you will probably have another index in mind.

When I find the specific folder that I want to move my images to, I just drag the pictures in to right folder.
OneDrive then starts to sync the pictures to the cloud so they can be stored safely. And you can reach them from any of your computers or phones.

But what about the storage on my computer??!?!?!

No worries. With the latest sync client for Onedrive (PC) you just right click on the Onedrive main folder and press “Frigör utrymme” (free up space)

This enables you to still see the thumbnails of every picture. But they are actually stored in Microsofts datacenter.
Once you click to open an image. OneDrive will automatically download it in its full glory.

If you want to use the pictures for say Adobe Lightroom and work quicker with the files on your hard drive. You just right click again and choose “always keep on this device”

As you can see below. The size of all the files is 361GB and the space used on my computer is 0 byte.

If I look at my folder I can see a small cloud telling me that the files are synced to OneDrive and not my computer.

Hope this could be of any help to you Photographers out there.