Getting yourself a new laptop and setting it up can be exciting. But a complex task that comes with setting up a new laptop is migrating all of your data and photos. You can prefer wired or wireless transfer depending on the hardware resources available to you.
- Using an external hard drive or USB stick
External storage devices are now cheaper than ever before. Even large capacity USB’s like a 64GB or 128GB stick are now affordable. A 128GB pen drive can hold about 90,000 photos assuming image size is 1.2 MB. If the images are of higher resolution, you can store about 30,000 photos.
If you don’t want to use a USB stick, external hard drive is also a good option. With several GB’s of space, your entire photo collection can be transferred to this drive and then on to the new laptop.
Note: Suddenly removing the external hard drive in the middle of a file transfer or plugging it out without “Safely Remove Hardware” may cause photos to go missing. If you have lost photos during transfer or due to any other reason, use SFWare for photo recovery. This tool has the ability to recover photos of any format like JPG, PSD, PNG, BMP, GIF, TIFF and many more including RAW formats.
- Use a Transfer cable
If you prefer wired transfer and don’t want to spend on an external hard drive, you can use a transfer cable. Basically you connect the two computers using this transfer cable; the software that comes with the cable allows you to transfer photos, settings and other data.
This method is comparatively faster than using an external hard drive. Using this method for data transfer avoids usage or external storage devices, and avoids any chances of data loss during transfer. If you are using a Mac you can directly put the source Mac device in Target Disk mode that makes your older computer be recognized as a external storage device and you can directly access data without any software suite.
- Cloud Storage
Cloud storing options from Google Drive, OneDrive, DropBox etc. are now one of the most popular means of file sharing and transfer. All you need is an internet connection and access to one of these cloud services. You can easily upload all your images from the old desktop to the cloud storage and then download them on to the new laptop. To upload and download images from cloud storage, all you need to do is select the images and click on the upload/download button. It’s that easy!
The free plan will have a 5-15 Gb limit depending on the provider, but you can always increase this by purchasing additional cloud storage plans. This would be the most recommended way to store photos as they can be accessed anywhere and can be downloaded on any storage device. There is no compression involved while storing the photos and they shall retain their original quality.
- Transfer through the network
If both your computers are connected to the same Wi-Fi or Ethernet, you can easily transfer photos online. The best and easiest way to do it on a Windows computer is by using ‘HomeGroup’, a built in tool available on Windows.
Search for ‘HomeGroup’ in the Start menu and click on ‘Create a HomeGroup’. Then take note of the password and choose to share your ‘Pictures’ folder. Now, open HomeGroup on the destination computer and enter the password to the group created earlier. Now you will be able to transfer images from the network with a simple drag and drop.
Wrapping it up…
By using any of the methods described, you can easily transfer photos from the old desktop to new laptop. As mentioned previously each of these methods might fall convenient depending on the resources available. While relying on external storage device can be most effective for large amounts of photos to be transferred, interruptions during data transfer can cost all or a part of your important data.
With the help of SFWare Photo Recovery Software, lost photos during transfer due to power surge or termination of connection can be easily recovered from the storage device. The tool uses extensive scan engine capable of retrieving data even from severely corrupted drives.
If you already have cloud storage, it can be a convenient option but the storage space always comes with a price. Lastly the easiest way would be to transfer the photos using a network drive. However this would require both the source and destination computers to be connected over internal network.
