Photo Tip: Digital Photo Storage

[FYI: This post is for the non-photographer reader. And for those in the know, while I am writing about jpegs, I do, in fact shoot RAW.]

Remember the days of film? You would take 24 or 36 pictures, take them to a lab and pick them up the next day or, if you were willing to pay a little more, in an hour? You didn’t always know what was on the roll, but whatever you had, you had a copy of forever. And you had your negatives.

Well, with the rise of digital photography, some things have become easier. Namely, you can see what photos you have within seconds, and you can choose to print only what you want to. You can delete the ones that you choose not to print, especially the ugly ones of yourself! While the up-front cost of a digital camera may be more expensive than a regular old 35mm film camera, the cost of use is significantly less expensive. That’s always a plus.

But what about the downsides? Well, as my mother says, “I have all these pictures, but they’re stuck on the computer.”

So, let me just take a few minutes to lay out some tips for keeping your photos for a lifetime.  Your digital media stores your photos at a designated size (which you can choose in the menu option of your camera’s functions/setup) and usually in jpeg format. Jpeg format allows you to store a good amount of photos on your media card, but there are some things you should know.

• Just because a photo looks great on a computer screen does NOT mean it is going to look that great printed. I know this is confusing, but the resolution for web is 72 or 96 dpi (dots per inch) while the minimum for a nice print is 200 dpi. (Most online print labs will give you a resolution warning that your images will look poor if printed– heed that warning or you may waste your money on prints that look like this:
• In computing, JPEG (pronounced /ˈdʒeɪpɛɡ/, jay-peg) is a commonly used method of lossy compression for photographic images.The compression method is usually lossy, meaning that some original image information is lost and cannot be restored (possibly affecting image quality.) (Thanks, Wikipedia. <–Check out that link for a great table of compression, near the bottom of the article.)

So what does that mean? Well, let’s say you simply upload the files to your computer and leave them in a file on your hard drive. Every time you want to show someone pictures or edit them a bit, etc.,  and you open and close that original file, you are actually continuing to compress the file. If you’re wondering why that photo you took 4 years ago looks a little blurrier now, that’s why. And if you only have a photo you took 4 years ago on your computer, you’re living on the wild side– what if your computer crashes and you lose all those precious memories???

Here are my suggestions for keeping your photos in tip top shape as long as possible:

1. Shoot in large Jpeg format. This allows more data to be saved in each image, resulting in the possibility of a larger print if you so choose.
2. Upload them to your computer, and then immediately burn them to a disc (CD or DVD) for safekeeping. Once a jpeg is burned, it is saved in its fullest size and will not continue to compress. Of course, if you pull it off the disc and back onto your computer, and then open, close, and save it again, it will compress, but a very small amount each time. My advice: pull the original back onto the computer for editing, putting on facebook, ordering prints, etc. and then burn a copy of the edited version. Then, you have both the original photo and the edited version saved in their fullest state. Make sure you label each disc, so you know which ones are the “originals” and which are the “edited” versions.
3. Order prints. Nothing beats seeing them in person around the house or in an album. But more than that, you have a copy if something happened to your disc or your computer crashes.
4. Re-burn your discs every couple of years. We just don’t know how long a disc will last before it can get corrupted. Again, another reason to print copies so you have those photos you really treasure.
5. In case of something crazy (i.e., natural disaster), you could also back them up online in an online vault, or with something like Carbonite.

I hope this helps! Please save those memories! Shoot me an email at tesorophotographers at gmail dot com if you have any questions about this. I would be more than happy to help.