99% of all travelers do not document their travel. This means, they do not sort their best photos for showcasing and nor they document their travel story etc. You need to be remaining 1% to be reckoned with well-travelled within your friends and family (of course, if you don't want to do that then that's a personal choice).
Nowadays most travelers shot using their mobile phones. Hundreds or thousands of their photos remain within their phones only. Those who sync with Google or Apple clouds, either fill up space quickly (meaning no further cloud backup) or stop backup altogether (meaning no back up in case phone is lost or become inaccessible).
You should do better - and this post tells you how to!
Firstly, when you share your photos to others, do not dump 👎🏻 thousands of photos to your viewers. Sort your best photos and only share those photos. As a thumb rule 👍🏻, try to share only your best photos - this should not be more than 10-20% of all photos you shot on a holiday.
If some photos are not good enough, cull them straight away. We strongly recommend downloading photos in computer 💻 first and work on them, rather than working on phone. You will get lot more screen estate in computer and working with keyboard makes you lot more productive.
There are free software to catalog your photos like this.
Sorting photos takes time, there is no way around that. Usually, 1 day is enough for this task.
Once you have sorted your photos it is important that you take a backup on a different physical device. For example, if you have master copies in phone, take back up in computer. If you shoot with camera and keep master copies in computer, take a backup in an external hard disk or Cloud.
If you want to show case your photos so that others can see them, there are several ways.
A popular but crude way is to circulate them via WhatsApp 📱.
A better way is to share via some web address. You can use social media sites to create albums. This includes Facebook, Google Photos etc. Depending on level of privacy you want you can either share in a way so that anyone with a URL can view photos or only specific people with accounts in specific social media sites (e.g. Facebook, Google etc.) can view your photos.
If you want to host photos in your own server, you have 2 options.
1.
Store photos in a NAS (Network
Attached Storage) disk which typically comes with free photo gallery software
so that you can simply share a folder and make it accessible via a URL. This
requires minimal technical expertise. All you need to do is a one off set up
for the NAS drive and just share the folders from the NAS drive's web interface
(or app in your phone).
This requires just one time purchase of the NAS drive. These are typically
available in 1 TB to 8 TB capacity.
2.
Store photos in your web server 🌐.
This requires some technical knowledge e.g., many such apps use PHP so you need
to understand PHP and manually upload your photos via FTP to your web server.
You also need to typically pay for your web server monthly or yearly. If you
need more space, you need to pay more.
Videos are different beast compared to photos. Because they take lot more space and editing videos take lot more time!
The storage option for photos equally applies for video. On sharing, most people upload in YouTube and share via unlisted or public links.
Be aware that unless you are already a popular YouTuber, your videos (even if public) are unlikely to appear when people searches for it. This is because Google prioritizes those videos which already had lot of views, from users with huge number of subscribers or where they feel they can earn more revenue from advertisement.
A popular video editing software is Open Shot.
If you fancy a write up then do it when the memory is still fresh. Even if you don't want to write for public, it makes sense to write few lines for your own recollection. We are surprisingly forgetful and after few years, looking at a photo you may struggle recall exactly where that photo was taken!