Storing your Digital Photos

As digital cameras and memory cards become better and cheaper, We have all started accumulating a lot of pictures. This is not a bad thing, but it does come with some problems. What can be done to prevent potential precious images from being lost on a hard-drive with millions of others, or lost forever in a catastrophic device failure? As with most things, image storage is both more convenient and more complicated than it was in the past.

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Your mom may have had a couple of shoe-boxes full of unsorted photos and negative strips in the closet, but at least she knew where they where, and they where not likely to disappear without notice. With digital cameras, we have the option of never printing our photos at all. There are advantages to making prints. They is not vulnerable to many of the factors that can destroy digital images. Physical prints are also easier to share with the people near you, which is why many people continue the tradition of making scrapbooks and photo albums. Digital images have in fact expanded the possibilities for photo-books and scrapbooks, and there are several services that will print them for you, but for a lot of people part of the pleasure comes from hands-on creation. The most important thing is to start with good quality printing. You should know how archival the materials your printer uses are, and the resolution they are printing at.

Although physical prints are important for archival purposes, a print, unless it is very large, is not going to contain as much information as a high quality digital file, so physical storage should always be used in combination with digital backup.

Digital Storage and Backup:

The two most common places that digital images are likely to be stored are on your camera's memory card and your computer's hard-drive. Unfortunately, these are also two of the worst places to store your images in the long term. Both of these places are for temporary storage. Use your memory card to store photos while you are out on a shoot or on a trip, but upload them to somewhere else when you get the chance. This will free up space on your memory card

to take more pictures, and will also prevent you from loosing what you have already shot in the event (knock on wood) that something happens to your camera.

I always think it is best to take photos in the highest resolution possible, and with the advent of the RAW image format, that it quite high. Shooting in high rez means the pictures are going to be more usable later for printing. It is very important if you want to get the best out of large-format printing of you shots. but it also means that you can't shoot for days without uploading.

TIP: delete photos that you KNOW are bad from the camera before uploading. It will cut down on your editing load later.

Organization:

There are any number of places that files can be stored, but with the sheer volume of pictures a lot of us take, the where can often matter less than the how. I often

just dump the images form my camera onto my hard-drive, without organizing or often even looking at the pictures. This means when I do want to make a print of a picture, I have to search through directories with inexplicable names until I find the one I want. It is important to have some kind of organizational system, the most obvious is to organize them in folders is by date or event (Visit to the beach, august 2011). But you can use whatever system works for you. The most important thing is to have a system, and use it.

Although hard-drives may seem to have a lot of space, most of us use a lot of space for our daily information needs. For this reason it is often not practical or possible to store a lot of high resolution photos on a laptop or even a desktop. Another reason that it is not good to use you computer's hard-drive for permanent storage is the possibility or device failure. If you images are not backed up in at least one other location, a virus or accident could cause you to loose everything.

Cds and DVDs

Cds and dvds make a convenient backup. They are relatively easy to store and organize, and they can be stored in another location than your computer. How

ever, there has been some doubt about the true archival quality of Cds and DVDs. There is also the issue that technology tends to become obsolete, so it may be necessary to transfer your image files onto a new media at some time in the future.

External Hard Drives:

These devices are great ways to store and back up data. There are many not very expensive ones on the market, and for between $150-500 you can get a drive that will hold all of your photos, and even back up your whole laptop. They are small and easy to store and carry around, and can be areal lifesaver if something bad happens to your computer.

Storing Images Online:

There are a wide verity of sites that allow you to store your images (and/or other digital information) online. These include sites that are primarily sharing sites, like flikr, and sites that are really just for storage, like SugarSync or Carbonite. Many of these sites have a free membership level, which allows limited storage, and a pro option that costs money but comes with multiple benefits. You will need to decide which option is right for you. The advantages of online storage are that you images are available anywhere you can access the internet, from any device. They can be shared easily, and they are managed by professionals, meaning you do not have to worry about the data maintenance.

However, be wary or sites that allow you to upload your photos for sharing, like facebook. They often do not store high resolution copies of your files, as the photos are meant for web use.

Sometimes our digital photos can become just an unwieldy mass of information, rather than a treasure trove of memories and beautiful moments. But if you do take the time to look back at what you have, I bet you will find some treasures that deserve to be put up on the wall!

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Digital Cameras and Digital Printing

We are living in the golden age of digital photography. Compared to 5 years ago, the technology has both improved in quality and decreased in price. This puts the capability to take good quality pictures in the hands of almost anyone. Digital cameras are actually quite different technically from film cameras, although they are operated in much the same way. This is just a quick overview of how digital cameras work, it is just meant to give you better idea of the process, so that you know what you camera is and isn't capable of.

One advantage of digital cameras is that they capture the image in a (digital) format, so they can be both displayed on digital media and printed easily. A film camera captures an image on a negative, which must be developed before being printed, and scanned before being displayed on screen. Digital images are much easier to convert into many different digital formats, and just as easy (if not easier) to print as film.

however, quite a lot of information conversion does take place when going from the world to camera to paper. Both film and digital cameras record the light that is bouncing off the subject by focusing it through the lens. Film cameras use a chemical process. The focused light hits the film, which is coated with a light-sensitive material. In a digital camera there is no film. In it's place is a sensor that reads the light focused by the lens and converts it into digital information (1'a and 0's).

Here is a really short explanation of how the sensor in a digital camera works.

Once the camera has received the light information and converted it in electrical information, it stores the data on it's memory card. Unusually when it does this is it compresses the image file so that you can take and store more pictures! The pictures are stored as either JPG files, TIFF files, or RAW files.

JPGs are the most compressed and RAW the least, with TIFF somewhere in the middle.

Here is a chart of the different file and image sizes of the different compression formats.

Image Size (pixels)	TIFF (uncompressed)	JPEG (high quality)	JPEG (medium quality)
640x480	1.0 MB	300 KB	90 KB
800x600	1.5 MB	500 KB	130 KB
1024x768	2.5 MB	800 KB	200 KB
1600x1200	6.0 MB	1.7 MB	420 KB

You can often change the settings on you camera to set the compression rate. If you are using the images on the web or on the computer, and want to shoot a lot, lower quality is no problem. But if you are planning to print them and enlarge them, is is always better to shoot at the highest possible quality. I personally find it better to always shoot in the highest available quality. it does not cost more, and it gives you more options if you do happen to get that picture worth a thousand words.

Tip: Make good use of your LCD display. Rather than waiting to get home to edit your pictures, delete photos that really don't work from the camera's memory card while shooting, to make room for new pictures.

Pixels and Print Quality

As you can see from the chart above, there is no strait correlation between pixels, file size, and quality. A larger file can have fewer pixels, and a file with fewer pixels can be higher quality, depending on the compression. The quality of the photo also depends a lot on how good the lens is. A better lens will give the sensor a sharper image work with in the first place. If you start from the point of taking picture, it is pretty simple to get the maximum quality file that your camera can produce. Just set your camera to the highest quality setting in the menu.

When transferring files over the internet, be aware that further compression can occur. Some email platforms compress files. Facebook always reduces the resolution of files, so it is not a good idea to store photos on Facebook, or use it as a source for photos to print. this is because images intended to be viewed on a computer do not need to be as good quality as images intended for print.

Print verses Screen Display

Just as no-one is going to appreciate your photographs when all you have are the negatives, no-one is going to admire them when they are stored on your hard-drive. Digital photography gives you many options for displaying your images, but they can be divided into two categories, Print and Screen:

When you are looking at an image on your computer monitor, the image quality is determined by the number of pixels the monitor is set to display. A monitor set to 640x480 pixels displays fewer pixels than a monitor displaying 1024x768 pixels, so each of the pixels on the 640x480 pixel monitor will be larger than each of the pixels displayed on the 1024x768 pixel monitor. A very high resolution image and a lower resolution image can look the same on you monitor. The difference will be that you will be able to see greater detail when you zoom in on the high resolution image. When you zoom in on the lower resolution image, you will quickly see the pixels, as they are much larger.

When you print a digital image, the resolution (number of pixels) and image size interact to determine the quality of the print. Printing is a way to display the true beauty and detail of your photos without the limitations of the screen. Imagine watching Titanic on you ipod, all of the work that went into making that movie beautiful, the costumes, the cinematography, the makeup and million-dollar sets, is displayed at maybe 10% of it's potential. the same is true of looking at a beautiful photograph over the web. The is often more information and detail available than your screen can display.

A printed image of course no longer has pixels. The pixels become dots of ink that the printer prints on the paper or canvas. With large-format printing, you can make use of all of the detail captured by you high resolution digital camera to print beautiful, large, high quality prints that can be put on permanent display. You camera captures images that where meant to be printed, as they often have more information than digital media can handle, and have to be shrunk when displayed on the web.

There are some websites, like stock photo sites, where you can download high resolution images. Most web-based images will be difficult to print at any reasonable size. This is because the image has been shrunk to transfer it more easily over the internet, reducing the overall number of pixels in the image. If the image has fewer pixels, than the dots that the printer makes will have to be larger. This can result in the pixels becoming visible, if an image is printed too large. this is what is referred to as pixelation.

Re-sampling

Re-sampling refers to a digital procedure that an image program uses to increase (or decrease) the number of pixels in a image. Very basically, the program uses an algorithm to create new pixels based on the pixels that already exist. This tool can work very well to allow us to create larger images from smaller files. There is of course a limit, this is not CSI Miami, and you can't zoom in on the reflection in someone's eyeball from a grainy surveillance video. The program is only able to guess based on available information. It is not able to put new information into the image.

Printing Options

The really great thing about Digital imagery is it gives you so many options for displaying the images you create. From simply posting them on facebook or flikr, you can import them into Photoshop or MS Paint and mess around with them to create something really original. When you want to print the image, you can print the whole thing, or a selection, at a wide range of sizes, as many times as you want, without altering the original. It also makes available almost every printing method that the modern world has invented. These include printing on traditional photo paper, whether matt or glossy, printing on fabrics such as canvas or satin cloth, printing on non-traditional photo papers like metallic paper, or other material such as vinyl or acetate. All of these printing methods are also available to traditional photography, but often the most convenient way of printing an analog image is to to first digitize the image by scanning it. There will always be a place for analog photography, but digital photography is it's own art form, and the convince it provides is really unbeatable.