Four Ways to Streamline Your Digital Content Securely

Four Ways to Streamline Your Digital Content Securely .We live in a digital world. Consumers of all ages are creating memories via photos and videos that are snapped every second and shared across social networks constantly.

However, what most of us don’t think about is how we treat these digital memories and how precious they are until our smartphone is lost; our digital camera is stolen; or, those memory cards find their way into the pool. Unfortunately, consumers tend to feel that their digital memories will “always” be there for them. Of course, that’s not the case and to help you secure those memories, here are five simple tips:

1. Beef Up Your Storage: External hard drives have come a long way. They used to be very expensive and a novelty item. These days, they are very cost effective and the technology has come so far that you can literally store your child’s entire digital life on a single drive.
Take the Western Digital My Passport 2TB hard drive. It’s compact and packs a ton of space for roughly $300. Using an external drive like the Western Digital My Passport will allow you to save all your digital memories as well as have them travel with you to the office, on vacation, etc.

2. Keep Your Head in the Cloud: Cloud storage is another way to go. There are enough services out there — some paid, some free — that will allow you to upload your images online. The best part is that you can do this on the go, which is helpful for those times that you want to reference an image you took a couple of years ago, but didn’t want to “store” on your device.

3. Share with Limits: We often want to share our work with friends and family. However, there’s always the worry of people using your images against your will or exposing your personal images publicly. So, before you hit the share button, be sure to look at your privacy settings to know who can see your images. Additionally, if you are sharing publicly, be sure that you clearly state whatever copyright rules you’d like to follow, like Creative Commons for example. Lastly, devices with USB 3.0 will help you speed up your sharing efforts.

4. Use Metadata to Track Your Stuff: If you’re that concerned about someone using your images for monetary gain or other non-approved reasons, be sure to put easily-identifiable keywords in the EXIF data (Exchangeable Image File Format that is a specification for the image file format used by digital cameras) of your images. This will allow you to set up recurring searches online for those keywords to see if any of them are being used without permission.
Learn more about WD’s My Passport 2 TB Portable Hard Drive.