All over the world, we take more than 1 trillion images a year, according to Climb Up Survey, most Americans take about 1,000 photos a year. Although many of these images are rarely viewed, they can be used to recall unique objects.
I recently told my cousin about a well-known portrait of our parents who were caught red-handed, standing in front of my Christmas tree, unaware that their picture was being taken. As soon as I explained, my cousin wanted to see it, and I did — I realized that it had been years since I had looked at it. I thought it was in one of the twelve photos that were in my living room, but I soon realized that this picture, along with hundreds of others since my daughter, was on one of my two retired laptops.
I am prepared to bet that you have memories like these, hidden pictures on an old hard drive, or a laptop that you have not used for years collecting dust in the back of your room. Like me, you probably took these pictures before you had a smartphone. I can download any image from my digital camera to my laptop.
I figured the only way to move the images was to plug them into a USB drive – a project I had started many times but did not finish – even during the plague. It’s as tedious as downloading music from a CD to your iPod.
It seems you are not alone. “Using a flash drive is a very simple and easy and time-consuming process,” says Nicci Trovinger, Windows marketing manager at Microsoft.
I have never been alone. “This is a common story, especially for millennials who have had several laptops,” says Jessica Carrell, co-founder of the organization. AnySoftwareTools, a technical site that provides computer-assisted instruction and training on how to do so. “Most of us do not realize that there are some important things stored in our old computers.”
Fortunately, there are easy ways to recover old photos — and save them so you can share them with your friends and family today. Here are some of them.
Problem: Your laptop is too old to access the cloud.
Answer: If your laptop has internet access, you can upload files from your laptop to the gallery such as Dropbox or Shutterfly.
“The best way to connect files from your laptop is with a platform like OneDrive or Dropbox, because these services provide software that you can download to your computer,” says Sean Fortner, a cloud engineer at IT services. Theorem. The software allows for quick download, because you can sort photos into folders and move multiple files at once.
Problem: The operating system on your laptop is too old to support the photo software or application you want to use.
Answer: You may need to download manually and install the latest updates for your old laptop first.
Even a few years after you changed your operating system, there is a chance that you will be able to change your operating system to support the graphics program, says Fortner. Although you are not upgrading to the latest version of the OS on your old computer, all you need is the security updates and patches needed to install the application.