15,000 digital pictures (& counting)

Well we’ve officially amassed >15,000 digital pictures since 2002 – that’s ~8 a day so it isn’t a crazy amount. I used to be able to back up to a DVD and get them all. Then a dual-layer DVD. Now I’ll be using multiples of something to get a physical backup.

I’m wondering how people will deal with all their digital media when they get 30,000 or 100,000. We have a daily backup to a networked drive. Home servers for average consumers (even if just for backups) seems like it will be a necessity. I bought Adobe Elements 6.0 (w/ Premiere Elements 4.00) for the new laptop. This product does a decent job of handling the large amount of pictures and grouping/tagging/stacking them (and a great calendar feature with the picture’s own data – great reason to set the date on your new digital camera).

I’d be interested if anyone else has a great way to deal with ~30Gb of images. How do you save them so you can find them? I can’t imagine a free service just giving up all that storage for free. Even if they did, it can take hours to transfer all the images just locally – it would take even more time to transfer across the Internet. Imagine if everyone did the same thing.

Any ideas?