A Short Guide to Getting your Digital Photos Organised
We are in the digital age, and most of us take our precious family photographs on a digital camera, mobile phone or i-pad. But where will these pictures all end up?
It is difficult to predict future technological changes and while digital images allow us to edit, copy, back-up and store thousands of pictures, the down-side is that many gadgets and storage methods might not be around for long. This obsolescence of electronic gadgets could lead to a real problem, so what we need is a plan to manage our growing image collections and protect them for posterity. Here are three things that you should do immediately:
First: Scan all the photographs you have in printed form. Scanning allows you to save your family’s best shots but it’s simply impossible to keep everything. Instead, choose the most important people and events. Tag each photo with details that you may forget in later years. A suggestion would be a simple ‘who, where and when’ approach, e.g. Auntie Gladys at Filey in June 1966.
Second: Organise pictures that are already in digital form but might be spread over several PCs, laptops and mobile devices. Buy a large external drive for your PC/laptop (2TB – that’s 2,000 Gigabytes of storage). This will store half a million pictures of the size taken by a mobile phone. On the new drive create a folder structure based on years and months, or on events and people. Make your mind up though as you will need to stick to this regime. Then spend some time copying the original pictures into the new folders. If you spend an hour now and then, you will soon have a logical and easy to search collection of photos. Don’t store anything else on this photo drive.
Third: Set up imports so that when you download your camera’s memory card or mobile phone pictures, they automatically get copied over to your external 2TB drive. There is usually a menu option for setting a backup location. This saves you all the transfer work that you had to do for Steps 1 and 2.
Assuming that you have carried out Steps 1-3, you are now practicing good backup techniques and you will have made copies of everything you need.
At present a 2TB compact external drive, or even better a solid state drive (it has no moving parts) with a standard USB connecter seems the best storage option. Most of your images will be in jpg format which also seems likely to endure. Jpg is short for the Joint-Photographic-Expert-Group; a body who oversee a standard so that all computers and devices can share images.
For added protection, do not to keep the external drive permanently connected to your PC/laptop. What happens if the PC goes up in smoke and destroys the external drive? And talking of smoke, for further protection you could keep the drive in a fire-proof box which you can buy at a reasonable cost from most stationers.
Written by John Anfield
Adobe Certified Expert in Photoshop
www.tactiletraining.co.uk