Keeping good care of your photographs

If you’re over the age of 30 then you probably looked at your old family photographs by flipping through an album with fading pictures stuck to pale card, protected by a cellophane cover.

Remember those days? What do you do now though? Do you still print off your photos or are they stored on your camera or phone?

It’s so easy these days to take a photo that we do it all the time, some people seem to be documenting their life through their camera phones.

There have been two massive revolutions that have affected how we view photographs, the first is the advent and subsequent ubiquity of digital cameras.

As cameras are now mostly digital (I can’t remember the last time I saw a film roll for sale), we have the option of viewing the picture we’ve taken almost instantly. We can then browse and delete the ones we don’t want straight away.

But do we do that? No, many of us simply store every photo we’ve ever taken. Eventually your memory fills up and you start to panic, so what do you do?

Well the second massive revolution has been in storage. I remember being at a friend’s house in Scotland when one of the first ever hard drives turned up in the post. It weighed a few kilograms and jumped across the desk when it was being accessed.

This disk cost over three thousand pounds and stored about twenty megabytes.

These days you can buy a 16 gigabyte card the size of your thumbnail for under ten quid.That means that you can store (on average) over 4,000 images on that one card! That means your camera could easily come home from holiday with the equivalent of 125 rolls of old film, where do you put it all?

LUCKILY THERE ARE A LOT OF OPTIONS, HERE ARE JUST A FEW:

Cloud storage

The “cloud” is the big talking point at the moment and there are dozens of companies setting up that endeavour to store everything you hold dear (well, the digital stuff, anyway) in a place where it’s totally accessible any time you want it.

They also maintain that it’s very secure and will remain very safe. How safe is safe though?

Some of the “safest” companies in the world have had their computers broken in to and so it always makes me wonder if it’s the wisest thing to do to have all your images uploaded into the Internet somewhere. I’m sure I’m being paranoid, but y’know, I just want a bit more control!

Hard drives

Now, there’s the hard drive on your computer and if you’re anything like me, it’s full of images that I have dealt with yet and that will eventually need to be sorted through. I probably won’t delete them though. My wife has a load of images on her camera and every now and then she’ll also download these to her own computer.

So we now have two places where we have stored images, sometimes from the same event with the same people in them. No wonder we can never find them when the relatives come round.

The saviour here is the portable external hard drive. There are loads of these about and they all operate in pretty much the same way.

You plug them into your computer via a USB cable and they appear on your desktop (or whatever it’s called on a Mac!) as an extra drive. Simply copy everything across to it and your files are saved.

Verbatim Hard Drive External USB 3.0 with Backup Software for MacOSX10.1 and Windows 1TB

Freecom Tough 3.0 External Hard Drive 500GB

Seagate External Hard Drive Retail Slim 500GB Port

But then there’s the security. If a burglar was to enter your house, would your hard drive be safe? Is it on plain view somewhere? If you want to be safe then you should ideally hide it away somewhere because by their very nature they can just be picked up and walked off with.

Want to know my solution? These things are so cheap these days I have two. One of them is stored in my mother-in-law’s fireproof safe and every month I copy everything from one to the other. That way the most I can lose is one month’s worth of imagery.

Want to know another secret? I encrypt the hard drive so if it’s plugged into another computer it can’t be read without someone knowing my rather tricky password.

DVDs

I know a lot of people who store things on DVDs and CDs and they’re quite happy about that. Until I explain to them how volatile the medium is for storage and that their data could be unreadable in a few years’ time.

CDs that you cut at home aren’t made in the same way as the ones you buy to listen to your favourite Foo Fighters album. The bumps and pits that make up the data are made using a laser that burns into ink and that’s where the volatility comes in. Left the CD out in the sun a bit too long? Ruined.

I’m not sure on the actual life span of a CD, some of the ones I’ve got in the loft still work fine, but others are totally unreadable. Guess it depends on where I bought them from and how cheap they were. I was pretty cheap back in the days.

Summary

The best solution is probably to have a mixture of methods. SD cards are cheaper than they ever were but we use them quicker than we ever did so you’re going to be spending a lot of money if you intend to keep them full of photographs.

Copying to the cloud or to a hard disk is relatively cheap, all you need to do is measure your own level of paranoia. And remember, it’s never a bad thing to have an extra backup…or even a few…

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