Why am I asking about photos?

I have taken at least 5,000 photos since I was in paris in 2009. I started loading them all into Iphoto then in 2009. I likely have at least 1,000 photos of my family in Paris and Nice when we took a bullet train from Paris to Nice on the Cote D'azure then (French Riviera). So, I don't want to lose them all. This last year though I bought a new Macbook pro because I couldn't update the operating system anymore for my 2009 Macbook pro anymore. However, now I have to try to upload all my photos of my family and myself traveling all over the U.S. and world. But, realized most of my normal ways of doing this I just wasn't sure of anymore.

Why?

Because up to about 2005 I stayed up to date on all PC stuff since I bought my first one in 1987. I bought my first computer (a TRS-80) for $800 in 1978. I studied Cobol and Fortran in college in the 1960s and worked in the computer field until I burnt out because there was no RAM available then and this made programming about 100 times more tedious than it needed to be especially during debugging of a program (unless you worked for NASA or someone like that who actually had RAM then).

RAM just means random access memory which was one of the benefits of miniaturization along with increasing speed exponentially of all computers while bringing down costs.

Anyway, after studying multiple computer languages including HTML by 2005 I was kind of burned out studying newer and newer generations of computer stuff having kept up the pace from 1965 until 2005 and deided to learn only a bare minimum because of increased speed (exponentially now) of obsolescence of all computer engineering information to the point where it is almost to the point where it is almost more useful to ask your computer wha the latest information is that is if you can formulate a useful question about it.

But, to even be able to formulate a useful question you have to know enough to even do that which is more and more difficult every year now for everyone.

So, the real problem is now "Do you really want to spend 3 months learning about something you might have to forget 1 or 2 years from now?"

And that is kind of where I find myself after studying about computers since 1965 constantly until around 2005 when I began to back off mostly because understood PCs from the beginning but then
as I switched from PCs to macs but never really knew macs even now at a core level like I once did all PCs.

So, now when I want to copy my pictures from my 2009 Macbook pro I find it is not that easy. So, I tried to download to "Google Drive" so after putting about 5 gigabytes in it is starting to freeze up on me so I can't do anything through my 2009 macbook pro. So, my latest idea is to get a 32gigabyte or larger thumb drive which is what I'm going to try next. I figure I could then download my pictures then to both my new Imac and my wife's desktop Imac so I don't lose any of the pictures. There are just too many pictures right now to consider putting them all on DVDs or CDs to me at present. Though DVDs likely would be one way not to lose them to solar flares or nuclear flashes or any EMP device that might occur around anyone's home which permanently destroys all magnetic memory.

Whereas the only real enemies of DVD storage or CD storage would be heat dust and possibly muddy dirty water flooding your homes.