What to do with all your digital images?

Here is a problem that many people will come across when it comes to digital photos.

They are all over the place and are always at risk of being lost, or worse, “deleted”. And there are more added every day, the smart phone in your pocket is ready all day and shooting a picture is now routine.

When I grew up, my family did not own a camera. Instead there were street photographers that would roam the streets in summer and offer photography services door to door. Cameras appeared in larger consumer numbers after 1960 and quickly became mainstream.

In the days before digital, it was a bit more orderly.

You would shoot several rolls of films during a trip and upon return take the films to a developer for processing and prints.

A day or so later you would go back to that place and receive a paper pouch with the negatives and a set of prints.

These pouches would show a date as well as the back of the prints. If anything, they were all together in a pouch, dated and all.

All that was left to do was sort the pictures and attach them to pages in an album. That is if you were a disciplined person and into photo albums.

Surely this was the right thing to do.

If you are more like me, you will have boxes full of photo prints in their original store pouches sitting somewhere in the attic or basement. Hardly ever to see the light of day again. Waiting for retirement time to do something with them.

Fast forward to today and here we are, having all we do in terms of photography (or video for that matter) in digital form.

Zeros and Ones……that is all it is. Hard to imagine how that works, but we all have it at our finger tips.

With storage cards inside cameras now as large as 32 or more GB, chances are that a huge amount of images sit on that card, mixed up with all sorts of activities: vacations, ski trips, family events…….

You see, it is so easy to keep shooting pictures and keep adding them to that storage card until that moment comes along that even this huge card is full.

What to do next?

Well, make sure you undertake action that assures that these many hundreds of images get preserved.

You could burn them onto a DVD, or move them onto an external drive or even onto your computer’s hard drive (make sure to make back-ups!)

In order to do this orderly, it is important to make sure that events are all filed and stored together in one folder.

So separate folders for each and every event, vacation or trip. It is the same like organizing your life, but in reverse……

Once the images are safely copied over, you can remove the images from your camera’s storage card and start the process of taking pictures all over again.

Obviously, the safest place to keep images is in print. Print is not subject to power failures, virus attacks or crashes. Print is permanent and can only be removed from one’s life by fire, theft or an ugly divorce.

Rather than sending all these images out for expensive individual printing, you can place them nicely in a printed Photo Book.

It requires an evening of work, but once it is done and you receive your printed book in the mail, it surely is a proud moment.

Photo Books are very suitable to share with friends or relatives, extra copies can be ordered without the extra work of making it yet again.

They will last a lifetime and absolutely assures that your treasured memories stay with you for the rest of your life.

And in the unlikely event you would need to order that book again, worry not! Your files will be preserved and be ready for reprints at any time.