As part of my new approach to photo management, over Christmas, rather than letting my laptop sit idle, I left it syncing every single (digital) photo I've ever taken to Dropbox.

My old way of storing and viewing photos was flawed and had to change. All my photos were stored on a Netgear ReadyNAS box. The idea being they're "backed up" (I know, however, that they're not) and accessible from any PC and not lost if ever a PC was.

The problem with the ReadyNAS was that, for whatever reasons, browsing photos on it via the network was painfully slow - to the point of being impossible. In the end I never bothered looking at them. The NAS box became the equivalent of keeping photos in an old shoe-box in the loft.

Not only was the ReadyNAS slow, but it didn't offer the level of backup that I'd like of such treasured memories. Losing all my photos would really, really upset me. Losing work is one thing, but memories you can't replace is something completely different.

As new photos were taken I'd add them to a folder on my desktop to then be sorted in to the right folder on the NAS at a later date. Trouble being I rarely had time to do this, so there were, in effect, two sets of photos. Only one of these was every viewed. The one on my desktop.

It was all a big old mess.

Enter Dropbox

Now all my photos are in one place (three actually) and backed up to a level that gives me complete peace of mind, using Dropbox. It would take a nuclear war (apparently) to wipe them out.

As soon as I copy photos from a camera to the My Photos folder in Windows (I've linked it to the My Dropbox folder) they're auto-synced to the cloud and then also down on to my Mac Mini, which is also running Dropbox.

Because my photos are now physically stored on my laptop I can view them at a speed you'd expect. This means I can look at photos I've not seen for years.

In total my "photos" folder has 16,200 files and takes up 26GB of space. To sync to Dropbox I had to "go pro", which costs about $20 a month. You can't put a price on keeping photos safe though, if you ask me. I also use Dropbox for work-related tasks and it's worth every penny.

As part of the exercise I had to move all videos out of all the "photo" folders in to one central folder on my laptop. Syncing all the videos to Dropbox would have taken forever and used up all the space on their largest plan. Instead I'll keep videos on the laptop (so I can actually watch them) and copy to the NAS every week or two as a backup. Not ideal, but, hopefully, in a few years time I'll be able to do the same thing with them.

If you worry about your photos you should put them in a Dropbox folder! Now.