photography tip: digital image storage

taking care of your photos is really important. i’m sure you all know someone who’s lost their data, crashed their hard drive, etc. so please consider taking care to archive your images properly.

i may not be the best one to talk, but at this point, i’m in pretty good shape with my photos, storage-wise that is.

i have probably upwards of 10,000 images on my computer & that’s just since i went digital, christmas 2003. i used to just download them to the computer & that was that. Of course, I started to get nervous about that & began burning cd’s for an additional copy. then i labeled them & put them on a shelf. now i am trying to do an even better job when it comes to archiving all those memories.

the first thing i do is import the images to my computer & external hard drive. the fastest & most reliable way to do this is to download the images from your memory card to the computer if possible. you can purchase a card reader pretty inexpensively these days if you don't have one built into your computer already. importing directly from your camera is the slowest & most dangerous way to import images.

external hard drives are really dropping in price these days, so it just makes sense to take the leap and get one. ideally, making a copy on a dvd-rw is my next step & if you don’t have an external hard drive, this is the next best alternative option for you. i use dvd-rw’s because they have greater capacity than a cd & can be rewritten to, for updates or edits or just to add & remove images. the price difference isn’t that much greater than the cd’s & to me it’s worth it.

now, when marking those cd’s or dvd’s, make sure to use a non-toxic marker. that would mean NOT A SHARPIE! sorry sharpie people, but you’re just no good for those disks! i use Slick Writer’s by American Crafts. i purchased mine at hobby lobby, but you can probably get them at most craft stores locally & online. they are great for scrapbooking, but also nice for writing on the disks because they are permanent, write on slick surfaces & are non-toxic too.