What to Do with Family/kid Photos to Preserve Them...

We have a solid state external hard drive.

I just want to add I said solid state because they are, well, solid. They don't have all the moving parts that tend to be what fails on older hard drives. Obviously they also store on my computer's hard drive and there are several free cloud based products that I allow to capture my pictures.

I have an external hard drive backing up my computer, plus I use the drive on the computer to burn a copy to a disk.

I also try to go through them once a year, and pick the best ~50 to make into an annual photo album because let's face it, probably no one is ever going to go back through all those files. If you sort them by year, and do 1 year at a time, you won't get so overwhelmed.

Once you pick your top 50 for the year, if you pop them into shutterfly or snapfish, they will organize the album for you based on the date the pic was taken. Done. You can go in and customize them, but that's creating extra work, IMO. If I hold myself to a high bar of making the PERFECT album, I'll never do it, so I take the one they make for me.

an External Hard Drive might be the best way for you to go.

I have no idea about a company that will do it for you. Why would you do that? Pay someone to access your computer and store your pictures? That would set you up for hacking.

You can copy and paste the pictures to the external hard drive yourself.

I have several external terabyte drives that I store digital photos on. I also tried to burn a physical disc for an additional back up. I've gotten seriously behind on that! Occasionally I'll get some highlights printed up because the kids love flipping through them.
You don't want to rely on your computer hard drive as your sole storage! In the event of a computer crash, virus or other computer issue you will lose everything. We lost some photos that way in the very early days of digital cameras. Thankfully they weren't a major life event, they were all photos from a museum exhibit of Star Wars costumes and props my husband and I went to pre-kids.
Costco will burn photos onto disc for a small price. You upload your photos from your computer at home and order the disc then pick it up and pay for it in store when it's ready. They will also store your photos that you uploaded in their cloud service once they are uploaded.

From everything I've been told by experts in the area, you should preserve your digital images in at least two different formats.

Even archival DVDs can fail or degrade over time, albeit a fairly long time. The ones I have are "guaranteed" for 40 years.

External, solid-state hard drives offer another option. They can hold massive amounts of digital images and offer one of the best forms of protection, but they are not completely immune to failure. Reading reviews on Amazon can give you an idea of the ones that perform best.

Flash drives are another method, but they are easy to lose, so be sure to label them and keep them in a safe space. They can also become corrupted. There are some special flash drives on the market just for photo organizing. One is called Picture Keeper. I've purchased one but have not used it yet, so I can't tell you how well it performs.

I'm not a big fan of storing my images on the cloud for privacy reasons. We have our digital images stored on computers and phones with backups on archival DVDs and flash drives. We also have a solid-state external hard drive that I haven't used yet but plan to transfer all of the images there soon.

We also make real copies of the photos we really love and put those in albums or frames.

I feel like having these back ups in different forms makes it more likely that if one fails, we will have the images in one of the other formats.

we put them onto disks and store them at my moms

We have a service that does the backup. I just have to make sure i launch the application so the backup happens. Okay...never mind...the "service" we have is actually just a backup drive that is next to my computer. That's why I must make sure it is plugged in😜 If it is not our stuff doesn't get backed up. (I also make iPhoto books for my each of my girls. I give them as Christmas presents.)

I have all of my pictures on external hard drives. My husband just had to get a new one because I filled one up recently - whoops!

I also upload everything to Shutterfly. It's easy to order from there and each of my kids use the app on their iPad's to look through pictures.

A friend told me she started using Forever.com. They do cloud storage as well as media conversion, but I'm not sure if they make media copies. I remember she said the account can be passed on to heirs too. You set up a beneficiary.

Right now, I have most of my photos backed up on an external hard drive, and some in Google Images.

I print the ones that really are special (frames or albums), external hard drive, flash drives (one per kid) of their favorites (often used for school projects, etc.), and the place I print them stores all my pictures there too. I don't have any really personal ones so it's not an issue.