Managing Digital Pictures

Digital pictures, what a boom to photography. With the reduced costs of digital cameras, taking pictures has grown by leaps and bounds. We take far more pictures knowing they are digital and don't require the processing expense of days gone by. The biggest obstacle we have now is managing and storing them.

Creating folders and sorting your pictures is a personal thing, Some people like devoting folders to an individual while others prefer sorting them by topic or event. Whatever way you do it, foremost in your mind would be security of your pictures, I'm not talking in security as in they may be stolen, but rather securing that you have them in event of catastrophic failure of your computer or hard drive. A hard drive failure, the need for a Windows re-install or any number of things can make your treasured pictures get lost forever. There are a couple simple options to ensure the safety of your picture and video files.

1. Burn your videos and pictures to CD's or DVD's. A bit time consuming, but worth it.
2. Add another hard drive to your computer just to store your audio, video and photo files. no matter what happens to your primary drive, your files will be on the secondary drive.
3. Save your files on an external hard drive. Once an expensive option, USB hard drives are now quite reasonable. A 300GB external drive can be had for less than $100. An advantage to this is being able to plug it into any computer and have your files available.
4. Save your pictures at an online storage sites such as Flickr, box.net etc. While all of these free online storage sites have size limitations, you can still safely store your files there. One can always create multiple accounts to increase storage capacity. You can access your files from any computer. Another fun feature is being able to make your photo/video files public to share with friends and family.

The most important thing is find a place to back up your files. Don't depend on your hard drive to protect your photo/video work.