Transcripts
1. Class Introduction: Like me, you find
a need to archive and organize all the
footage and photos you've ever taken
so that if you need access to them again in
the future, you have it. Unfortunately,
that means storing a ton of raw photos
and four K videos, which fills up your
storage space super fast. So unless you want to
buy an endless supply of external hard drives,
what can you do? I've been tackling this
problem for many years now, and I finally come up with a system where I feel like I've achieved infinite
free storage space for my videos and photos. It sounds too good
to be true, right? Well, there are some compromises that must be made for video. But overall, I'm pretty darn
happy with this system, and I'm happy to report
that I won't need to buy any new external hard
drives for a long time. And if you're ready to learn about this infinite
free storage method, that basically anyone that
has access to the Internet can use I'll catch you
guys in the next lesson.
2. Unlimited Photo Storage: Before we begin, the
class project is to implement one of the storage
systems that I highlight. Let's go ahead and start off with unlimited photo storage. Way that I personally
achieve this is by using Amazon photos. But let's rewind it for
just a little bit first. If you've been a
creator for a while, you remember that Google
Photos used to offer free unlimited storage for
photos and compress videos. It was a golden age of
archiving photos and videos for free because
it was made so simple. Well, unfortunately,
those days are over because Google
ended that in 2021. Since then, I've researched alternatives and the only
service that I found that made sense and offered free unlimited storage
for photos Amazon photos. And they actually do it
better than Google photos by allowing you to upload as
many photos as you want, even in the raw format
in original quality. That to me is pretty crazy. It means that you no
longer need to store your raw photos in an
external hard drive if you want to edit
your old photos. All you need to do is
go to Amazon photos, look for it, download
it, and edit away. What's the catch?
Is Amazon photos actually free? You
might be wondering. Well, that depends.
Amazon photos is free, but you don't get
unlimited photo storage unless you have Amazon Prime, or a friend or family adds
you to their family vault. At the current
moments, I'm using Amazon photos for free with unlimited storage thanks to a family member who
has Amazon Prime. Steps are super simple. You ask your friend
or family member who has prime to go
to Amazon photos, enter the family
vault and type in your Amazon account
e mail to add you. From there, you have access to Amazon photos Unlimited storage. Take note, this is Amazon themselves telling
you that you can invite five people for free so that they can also have
unlimited storage. Yet, interestingly, based on
talking to people around me, I feel like at this moment, 80% or more like 90% of Amazon Prime users don't
have anyone added to this. It's like the hidden gem of unlimited photo
storage right now. By the way, it says
that you can share photos with other members in the family vault,
but don't worry, just because you upload
photos in the main area, doesn't mean that it
automatically gets shared with the rest of the people
in your family vault. So that is how you gain access to unlimited
photo storage. And in order to use it, you
simply need to drag and drop photos from your file
manager into the website. I recommend creating albums
with dates and names, since it's a bit
more difficult to look for the right
photos without that. Google Photos was definitely better when it came to search. But as long as you stay
organized with albums, you should be able to find
your photos quite easily. You can also download
the phone app to sync your phone photos. I do is I favorite my photos at the end of
the month and delete everything else that's not my favorite on my iPhone
to clear up the storage. And that's pretty much
all there is to it to unlimited photo storage
at original quality. The BD is that you can
access it on the Cloud anytime you have
Internet on any device. And the only reason I
can think of that you'd want to store your photos
in an external hard drive at this point is if you're
extremely paranoid that one of the biggest companies in the world's servers
will fail somehow. It's more likely that your
external hard drive breaks first before that happens. So try not to stress
too much about it. All right. Let's move
on to video storage.
3. Video Organization System: Let's talk about my method
for unlimited video storage, which is probably not
what you think it is. Unfortunately,
there's nothing like Amazon photos for videos. But if you're okay with what
Google Photos did when they had unlimited storage for
videos at compressed quality, then this method is essentially
the exact same thing. And I do suspect that it's literally the
same thing because my method uses YouTube as a video archive and
organization system. There are a few ways
to approach this. Firstly, you could directly upload the videos into YouTube, which is not what I do
because that would be messy. The actual way that I use is to first compile
all the footage for one project that I shot together and then export it. It's
like a compilation. And after that, I upload it to YouTube and give
it an easy name to remember and perhaps
some details about the project in the
title or description, and add it to my
projects playlist so that I can easily
find it again. And in order to download it, I use the free
version of something called four K Downloader Plus. All you need to do is copy
and paste the link from YouTube and change the settings to make sure that you
download it in four K. Might have to sometimes
download an MK V file, and you'll need to
convert this by using VLC or handbrake. I personally use handbraak, and I drop the
footage in and set the settings to production
Max. Then I hit Start. After it's done, assuming that
you're using Premier Pro, in order to make it separate
clips again in your project, you can use scene edit detection and check the box that
creates sub clips. It'll take a bit of
time for this to work. But from there, it's
basically like you're working with the
original clips laid out. However, the compromise
is that you're no longer working with the original
quality of the footage. It's not too noticeable if you just use the footage as is, but if you try to
color grade it again, it may end up falling apart. So, unfortunately,
you won't be able to use this method to store
raw or log footage. It'll result in a
different color. You'll need to do
the coloring before you archive the footage
is what this means. Unfortunate compromise,
but at the very least, you still have access to all
the footage you've recorded, including the clips
that didn't make it to the final
cut of your video. So knowing this, if
you're going to re use any footage or
recolor it again, definitely keep an
original on the drive. That's my method for
unlimited video storage. It's not perfect, but it does the job well enough
for me so that I know I have access
to all the footage I've ever shot in an
organized fashion. I also archive my phone videos in the same way to clear
up storage on my phone. If I ever want to view
a certain video again, I can go to my memory playlist
or just search for it in YouTube Studio and web browser
or the YouTube Studio app. On your phone. I think the
ideal situation is that you make a separate YouTube
account just for archiving, but I ended up just putting
it in my personal channel and uploading these
archives as unlisted. Either way, should work fine.
4. Class Conclusion: All right. So that was my
personal archiving system that helped me achieve unlimited
free photo and video storage. Basically, just
use Amazon photos for photos and
YouTube for videos, while creating good album
names, playlist names, and title names for good
organization and retrievability. Hopefully, you guys found
this many class useful. If so, consider giving the class a review and hitting
that follow button. It really does help out a bunch. So thank you and good
luck with your projects. I'll see you guys
in the next class.
Scott Luu, Video Creator
