Photo Storage Websites

I’ve mentioned before that I’m looking for ways to store my digital images somewhere other than my hard drive. I have probably thousands of images and even though I’ve taken the time to weed them out and get rid of the ones I don’t love. There are still tons of very large image files I need to remove. I even defragged my hard drive so the fragmentation wouldn’t hinder my ability to store images, but I’m almost out of room.

My best friend suggested a digital photo site. You upload your images to their server and they keep them for you forever. The biggest benefit of this, for me, is that anytime I want to create a photo gift or print a picture all I have to do is select and go. Pretty nice. Also, many of the sites now have additional editing options, if you want to do more with your image than what your software allows.

There is a downside, though. First, they could go out of business and then your pictures go poof if you don’t have a backup somewhere. Also, the image resolution isn’t always as high as you may want which could affect the quality of the image.

I’ve decided that I am going to upload my images, but I’m also going to back them up…just in case. What do you think of the photo storage websites available now?

Photo Credit Svadilfari

June 19th, 2009 by birdievogel | Posted in Large Files | Comments (0)

Digital Image Storage Options

I adore my digital images. Mostly they are of my son and husband, but there are also a lot of vacations, animals, and friends. Unfortunately, all of these images eat up the disk space on my laptop. I use my computer for work as well as fun, not just photography. This means I need all the room I can get. I usually go through my pictures and delete the ones I don’t absolutely love, just to get more room. Of course that fragments my hard drive, so then I have to go through and defrag every once in awhile too. Not much of a problem, but I still run out of room.

So where else can you put your digital images, other than on your computer or camera? Well I edit most of my images so they don’t stay on my camera card. I upload them to my computer and delete them off the camera. Then I edit and keep only the ones I love. The options from there are write them to a disc, upload them to a storage site, put them on an external hard drive, put them in a digital frame, or print them and put them in an album or traditional frame.

The only thing I’ve decided for sure is that I want to keep digital copies. What is your favorite way to store your images?

Photo Credit Bohman

June 18th, 2009 by birdievogel | Posted in Large Files | Comments (0)

Compression

All of this talk about how large digital image files can be has made me thing about ways around the hugeness of my image files. I’m the mother of a beautiful, and photogenic, little boy. All of the images I have of him could probably fill several photo albums. All of these images take up tons of valuable space on my hard drive that could be used for more pictures of my little angel. Even with deleting the images I don’t love and then defragging my computer to make more accessible room out of my previously ridiculously fragmented hard drive, I still need more room.

This is where compression comes in. Unlike the compressing going on in the picture above, compressed digital images retain their original shape. There are two types of compression: Lossy and Lossless. Lossy means you lose some information (though you probably wouldn’t be able to tell most of the time) and Lossless means no information is lost. Those two types of compressions come in multiple file type flavors such as GIF, JPG and TIFF.

A lot of information, I know, and I’ve only touched the tip of the compression iceberg. What you need to remember is, if you have a lot of large digital image files you need to look into compressing them. It will save you tons of disc space and let you keep more of the images you love without having to buy a computer just for your digital images.

Photo Credit P.C.W.

June 17th, 2009 by birdievogel | Posted in Large Files | Comments (0)

Resolution

What is resolution? No, not the kind you make on New Year’s Day. The kind that affect your pictures. Well each image you take with a digital camera is made up of pixels. The number of pixels you have along the width and height of your picture is what is being referred to when someone talks about the resolution of the image. Pretty cool, huh?

So the smaller the resolution, the fewer the number of pixels. The higher the resolution of the image, the bigger the file. Now the reason this matters in photography is the bigger the file the more disk space you are going to use when you save the image to your computer (from your camera). This can eat up disk space until you do whatever you are planning on to it and then remove it from your computer. I do recommend removing it eventually, by the way, otherwise you’ll end up with a computer that is only a very expensive photo album. When you do get around to removing the image, make sure you defragment your hard drive to clean up the space for your next set of photographs. A fragmented drive just slows everything down.

If you are just going to be using the images on the computer, the resolution really doesn’t need to be more than 640×480. However, if you want quality prints you should aim for 1800×1200 or higher depending on the size of the print you want.

Photo Credit Dull Hunk

June 15th, 2009 by birdievogel | Posted in Large Files | Comments (0)