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how to store your photos


How not to loose your original photos -

There is one very important concept to understand in digital photography when you push the button on your camera to take a photo, the camera stores the photo as a file on your memory card, if you modify that file with computer software or delete it from the memory card or computer hard drive it is gone for ever, there is no negative or slide film to get a reprint.

So it is very important to look after these original files if they are important to you.

If you do not have a computer, and take your memory card to a printer always make sure you ask for the original photo files to be copied to a CD or DVD disc which you can take away with any prints. You may decide you want to copy all photos to a disc but only print some of them, this to is possible.

If you do have or intend to use a computer create a folder structure to store your photos following the principles of this example -
please note - this is not a computer lesson but assumes you have basic computer skills.

folders2.jpg

You can see in the screen shot above that I use a folder structure starting from My Documents, My Pictures - Images in - 2008 Family - Kids - modified.
Originals images from the camera will be loaded into kids, and modified images will be saved, using the save as option in the modified folder, you will then have two copies.

So each time you have a new project, before connecting the camera to the computer, create a new folder as follows -
  1. Click my computer or Start my computer, and click a button called folders, which should give you a folder tree similar to above on a windows machine.
  2. Looking down the folder tree you will see + and - symbols, a + opens a folder to perhaps see more sub folders inside, so following the example above locate the my Documents, My Pictures, Images In folder.
  3. Now find the File Menu usually top left of your screen and click New - folder, and name it whatever you like eg: 2008 family. You can ceate a subfolder in exactly the same way, by selecting the 2008 family folder, going to File - New Folder and naming it Kids.
Important Note: For those who wish to maintain the highest image quality please read - 
Your camera will unless selected otherwise save images in JPEG format. This format uses a compression facility to make your images much smaller file sizes. This helps the camera process images much quicker and enables your memory card to store many more photos than other formats. this sounds great and it is, BUT each time you save a JPEG image as a JPEG you apply the compression again and therefore deminish the quality, perhaps leaving the image blotchy and poor quality. The answer to maintaining ulimate quality is to save in a lossless format such as TIFF. You do this when you click save from the menu from a box called "save type" and selecting TIFF. It is worth looking for an "option" box to save as a LZW type TIFF which is a TIFF  format with lossless compression as this will save space on your hard drive . 
If you are a family snapper and you are unlikely to keep resaving your images over and over again you may be quite happy just keeping to saving as JPEG so ignore this note.
Sorry if this is confusing.
Other options -
  • save your images to DVD as well as the hard drive on your computer
  • buy an external hard drive of at least 250GB to store your photos on a second hard drive, remember if your hard drive fails you loose your pictures, and it can happen.
  • a small number of images can be saved to a USB memory stick which simply inserts in a USB slot on almost all computers, this is great for sharing photos with someone else who has a computer.
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