Storing Photos “What to Consider when Storing your Digital Photos Sudbury Shutterbugs Feb 2015

What’s Important when Saving Digital Photos? You must have a computer Safety – Is the media robust? – Is the media resistant to aging? – Is the media portable? Fire Theft – Can the media be easily duplicated/backed up?

What’s Important when Saving Digital Photos? (cont’d) Ease of Access – Can you access from anywhere? – Are you confined to your computer work station? Support – Will the media be supported over the near/long term? – Indeed does the media need support? Cost – For the purposes of this presentation, we’ll refer to the cost of saving 100 photos of 10 Megs in size each (in other words, 1 gigabyte).

What’s Important when Saving Digital Photos? (cont’d) Indexable – How do you find a photo quickly? Typical index variables might include: – Why the photo was taken – Where it was taken – When it was taken – Who is in it – Type of file (JPEG, GIF, RAW etc.) – Quality of photo – Is it adjusted (edited) or is it an original – A sample index method is included at the end of this presentation

Methods and Media The following slide identifies methods and media currently available for use when saving your digital photo files. It is important to remember that multiple copies in multiple locations is highly recommended to offset the possibilities of fire, theft, catastrophic failure etc. Each dimension has arbitrarily been assigned a value out of a possible 5 points (being ‘the best’) with the exception of cost which is expressed as the cost of storing 100 photos of 10 megs each.

Storage Comparison Cost of storing 1 Gigabyte of data ( meg photos) MethodSafetyEaseSupportIndexCost Floppy Disk2400n/a CD/DVD4430$0.25 Memory Card4230$1.50 Computer Hard Drive4355$0.04 External Hard Drive4455$0.045 Cloud Drive5555$0.47/yr* * highly variable depending on supplier

My Indexing Method C:\Users\Ron\My Pictures\ – Next Level Folder 1Costco (place copies all of the pictures I want printed here – the ‘1’ places the folder at the top) Sportsmens (Date taken and Place) Big50 (My favorites) Europe1 (pictures for Europe slide show)

My Indexing Method C:\Users\Ron\My Pictures\ – Next Level Folder 1Costco (place copies all of the pictures I want printed here – the ‘1’ places the folder at the top) Sportsmens (Date taken and Place) Big50 (My favorites) Europe1 (pictures for Europe slide show) – Inside These Folders DSC_0115.JPG (downloaded from camera) DSC_0115.NEF (downloaded from camera) Sport0010.jpg (Edited picture)

Additional Indexing Tools If I want to select pictures of a certain person… – Use Picasa software…it indexes pictures and does a pretty good job of identifying faces If I want to identify ‘best photos’ – Picasa or other post production software normally have a ‘star system’ to attach to photos…usually 1 to 5 stars – Usually the adjusted photos are best so, my naming convention separates those in each folder – Special folder (Big 50, Europe, etc)

Bottom Line Safekeeping is Job #1 Familiarity with the Operating System’s file management scheme is a necessity There are common methods to index files, but, in the end, it is a personal choice (maybe that’s why they call it a personal computer?)