This board is inspiring me, but what do I do with all my pictures?

[KarenB]

I enjoy looking at all the talent found on this board. I love taking pictures, always have since I was a kid, but never really did much with it. My friends and family would praise me for my pictures but that is as far as it goes. I would like to do a little more. Just keeping my camera with me all the time, possibly making note cards out of my photos, I don't know. My biggest concern is this:

What do I do with all my shots?

I had a laptop. I would take photos, transfer them to adobe photoshop album, and burn them on to 2 CDs to keep and finally deleted them from the camera. I liked that as I could easily e-mail them to people, use my shots as wall paper, etc. Then came the crash. I lost all pictures I didn't have on a CD. Now I have a new computer. I have recent photos (last month) transfered into folders in Media Center, then burned on 2 CDs. But I can't seem to use them in Media Center as wall paper and easy access as adobephotoalbum.

So what do all of you do? Eventually I would think we will all go through some kind of computer change or crash and have to do something with thousands of stored photos.

Thanks,
Karen

 

[handicap18]

I print mine out and store them in a photo album (though I'm very behind right now, don't if/when I'll be able to catch up). I have an online photo album that I download photos to so I can share with family and friends (I use photobucket.com, but it does compress the photos). I also will enlarge some that I really like to 5x7, 8x10 or 8x12 (am considering doing a few 12x16's as well) and those are matted and framed and hung on the walls.

I NEVER delete any photos off my media card until I have burned them onto a CD and/or DVD. A few years back I lost about 250 photos because of a hard drive failure on my PC. Also media cards are really coming down in price (especially if you use SD). You can get a 2gig card for about $35-40. Not a bad investment if you don't take a lot of pictures.

 

[OCSurfCity]

After any of my photo shoots, I immediately do the following:

1) Burn all images on a CD. I do not save my images on the hard drive in case it crashes like in your case.

2) Mark the CD with the subject and the date the images were taken. This way you will have a record of who, what, where, date and time. Don't rely on your memory!

3) Store the images in cool, dry location away from anything corrosive.

4) If the images are important, make TWO copies of the CD. The master CD should be placed in a safe location. The second CD can be used to take to the photo lab for printing.

5) Keep one copy of the index print with the CD so that you can find images quickly.

 

[Yellow_Stitch]

As far as backup, I burn them all to CD, but since I bought an extra 250GB hard drive (very cheap at Fry's) I leave copies on that so I can look at them easily and rotate folders in and out of my screensaver lineup. That is my favorite use of my photos-the screensaver. Our PC is in the living room so even when watching TV, on commercials I turn my head and watch the great memories from WDW go by....

 

[Renysmom]

I back all mine up on CD, print severalhundred of them and for fun I just completed making a video using all my ohotos, the music I have been colecting here and movie maker (free with windows XP). My video is 54 minutes long and pretty cool if I do say so myself. I burned it to a DVD and we can watch it on our big screen TV.

 

[boBQuincy]

Scrapbooking! Digital, of course. Turn those images into family hierlooms, personalized works of art. Even priceless treasured memories!

Ok, I'm getting carried away, but it's a great way to showcase your images.

As for storage, I like to go overboard in the pursuit of safety. Our images get saved to hard drive, burned to CD/DVD, copied to an external hard drive (kept in a fireproof box), and copied to a file server for easy access.
*Then* the memory cards are formatted.

Out of control? Maybe. Secure? Probably.

 

[MarkBarbieri]

I copy my RAW images to a RAID 5 NAS. I convert them to DNG files (also stored on the NAS). Then I process them into JPGs. I store the JPGs in the main "My Pictures" folder on our network for display around the house. I also upload them to my photo website. Finally, I burn duplicate DVDs of the DNG files and JPGs and store one DVD at home and one at the office.

 

[pyrxtc]

I'm taking the good ones from all year and making a mypublisher book out of them with the year on the first page. Then you can just grab whatever year you want to look at see all the fun things we did that year.

 

[MOmousefan]

I would like to ask boBQUINCY if you use a program to create the awesome scrapbook, and if so, what is it!

 

[MarkBarbieri]

I'm taking the good ones from all year and making a mypublisher book out of them with the year on the first page.

At the end of each year, I combine my favorite photos into a slideshow and set it to music. You can see ours at http://barbierifamily.org/slideshow.

I also created a slideshow for my four year old's birthday showing pictures from the day he was born until a few days before he turned four. It was fun to watch him grow up on screen.

 

[boBQuincy]

I would like to ask boBQUINCY if you use a program to create the awesome scrapbook, and if so, what is it!

Thanks!

I use Photoshop since it is what I am used to. Elements should do most, if not all, of the same effects.

Most of my little icons are either scanned in from printed material or purchased from PCHugCLub.com (their prices are very reasonable).

There are other Disney Digital Scrapbookers with a lot of really nice pages on The Creative Community/scrapbooking forum. Digital scrapbooking is fun!

 

[Boss Hogg]

Keep ours on our mac, copy them to CD and also back them all onto one of our iPods. If we lose them after all this, then I guess it was just meant to be!

 

[jann1033]

i'm lazy and just burn them to a cd..

but am going to go over to the scrapbook thread and see what's going on there. now i'll really never be off the computer

nice work bob q

just fyi, our computer did crash a few months back and we were able to get all our pictures.documets etc...the nice people who installed the new hard drive could get them somehow from our old hard drive so if it happens check and see if the repair person can get them( same thing happened with daughter's when hers crashed so it must be doable fairly often)