Storing Digital Photos From Camera
was fortunate to have a mentor who taught me on the day he took me under his wing all about the importance of caring for negatives and slides. “Pictures can be damaged,” he told me. “But as long as you have a good negative or transparency to work from, the world won’t end when your great work of art meets an ill fate.”
And so every time I developed film or picked up transparencies from a lab (I would never, but never, send them through the mail – way too many opportunities to be lost or damaged), I faithfully put the negatives and slides in protective, archival sleeves inside notebooks. Then I dated them and stored them in a dry, safe place. To this day I can find negatives and slides from 20 years ago within five minutes (whether I should have saved them all is a totally different story).
I was even a bit smug with how well I had preserved everything.
But when I began shooting digital images I was so intent on learning new technology and exploring possibilities and limits that I simply downloaded my photos onto my hard drive and went to work on them in PhotoShop without even considering how to protect my images. At the time, I wasn’t sold on digital and was just playing around with a little point and shoot, so I didn’t consider things like organizing and storing the pictures.
A few months into my digital dizziness, I noticed my computer had become very slow. It took a few hours before it hit me: those digital images are real space hogs! Immediately following that realization was the frightening thought that if my computer were to crash or if a virus attacked it, I could lose months of work.
Immediately, I began to look for solutions. While I’m not totally satisfied with any of these solutions, in the right combination, these steps will help you protect your digital images.
1. First and foremost, make sure you save original files. Never change that file. Do a “save as,” and only edit the “saved as” image. I learned this the hard way. I was in a rush to get a client an image for her Web site and resized the image accordingly. I was so used to being able to change sizes with negatives, I didn’t stop to think about changing a size with a digital image. When the client asked for the same image for a brochure, I couldn’t provide her with a high-quality print image. Learned from my mistake.
2. Next, you need to back up every image. There are a number of ways to do this.
- Keep them on your memory card. Beware of choosing this option. It can be pricey, and those small cards are easy to lose. They can also get damaged easily.
- Back up every image on a CD. Make two copies. Store one someplace handy; store the second copy somewhere safe off-site. Space is limited on a CD. I’ve found them less than adequate for the number of photographs I take.
- Back up every image on a DVD. Again, make two copies. DVDs have far more memory than a CD, so if you have lots of images, it’s worth investing in a DVD burner.
3. Make high-quality prints of all your images. This isn’t ideal because scanning an image sacrifices some degree of quality, but it will provide some level of protection.
4. Use online storage. There are numerous websites that allow you to download photos to their server so you can share your photos with others. Sounds like a great solution. You won’t have to invest in CD or DVD burners or writable discs. However, size limits do apply. I also strongly advise only going with a web site that has a proven track record. Remember, too, that their server could get a virus. They could go out of business. And security issues are a concern.
5. External drives. There are a number of these, from very small in size (but big on memory) thumb drives to external USB hard drives, some of which can hold up to 40 gigs.
Things to keep in mind when choosing a storage method:
1. Technology changes rapidly, so be prepared to change with it. CDs and DVDs may well be obsolete in ten years, so all that downloading and burning will likely have to be redone down the road. Expect change.
2. Using more than one backup method is a good idea. External hard drives can get viruses. They can get broken. They can crash. CDs and DVDs can get scratched. It’s a lot of work to have multiple backup sources, but if you value your images, it’s worth the investment.
3. Do not buy off-brand CDs or DVDs. Go with a name you can trust. Same with external or portable drives.
4. Remember that you should never edit your original image. And that is the image you will want to back up. (Although if you have spent hours creating special effects on an image, that’s certainly worth backing up as well.)
Perhaps the day will come when you can easily print directly from your computer to a 35mm or medium format film, which will give you the assurance that you will have negatives just like you used to. Until then, make sure you back up, back up, back up.
from
No comments:
Post a Comment