Digital Photography – Tips for Storing your Pictures

Many of us love to take pictures with our digital cameras, so much so, that we have thousands of pictures on our computer hard drive. This is not a good scenario. Why? Because if your hard drive fails, for any reason, you stand to lose all of our pictures, possibly on a permanent basis. Here are some tips on what you should do to protect your precious pictures:

1. Select a good storage medium. It is recommended that you do not use any type of magnetic media to store your photos, such as a zip drive. You are better off to use a memory stick, or a CD or DVD that you can burn your pictures onto.

2. When you save your pictures onto whichever format you choose, be sure to label the disk or the drive with a list of what types of pictures you have on that media storage. You can create a separate document with the photo information and keep it together with your photo disk or number the disk and the list so that they correspond. If you choose to save your photos to a disk, you may consider using a binder with plastic pages in which you can insert the disks together with the list of what is on that disk. If you can, save the lists on your computer, somewhere, in a large document so you can easily search for the photos when you need to.

3. Remember to label your pictures very specifically - people's names, places, dates, etc. If you have ever looked at old pictures and wondered when they were taken or who the people were, you will appreciate what we are talking about here. If your children or grandchildren view your disks 30 years from now or 100 years from now, the photos will be much more meaningful if they can identify the people in those pictures and when and where those pictures were taken. You may even consider doing some notes about the photos, if it was someone's birthday, or a special occasion.

4. Make more than one copy of the CD or DVD. One can be kept in your binder album, the other should be stored away from your home at someone else's home or other convenient place, so that if your house burns down or some other catastrophic event takes place, your photos will not be wiped out in the process.