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Practical Ways to Preserving Your Pictures

To many of us who are getting older, memories are best preserved in the pictures we have collected. Formerly we were told to preserve not only the picture but also the negative; then other prints could be made. Now young people don’t even know what a negative is! So how can I preserve my digital memories?

First, make sure you take plenty of pictures and have family members do the same. Since it doesn’t cost any more to take extra pictures, take many more than you want to keep. I recently purchased a 4 gig card for a new camera, in anticipation of a trip to visit friends and relatives. When I got home, it still said I could take another 10,000 pictures without running out of memory!

After collecting your photos, don’t be shy about deleting ones you don’t want for whatever reason. You don’t have to keep every one. However, you may want to keep some that contain special people, poses, or memories, even if they aren’t the best. It doesn’t cost any more to keep it.

Computer programs allow you to set up electronic photo albums and catalog the pictures in whatever way you want. Take the time to write captions for even the most familiar scenes. I have many colored slides taken by my parents in Europe but I don’t how of what they are taken. This frustration can be eliminated by adequate labels.

You may feel you are finished with your project. But take a second to think about the fragility of your memories. Without paper copies, they could be gone in a second! If they are on floppy disks, you might not even have the media to read them any more! Floppies are also vulnerable to magnetic fields.

At first, when CDs came out, everyone thought they were much more indestructible than floppies. Nothing touched the surface so nothing needed to wear out. But now we see that scratches or breaks are much too easy and again the memories can be lost.

One answer to this is storing your photos in several places and several locations. If you store them on a CD, for example, keep copies at another home, at work, or in a safety deposit box. Before your hard drive is backed up regularly, and, if possible, back it up also on a network drive in another location. As the media changes, be sure to transfer the pictures to the new media, lest it become unavailable. Imagine what you would now have if all your past pictures were stored on 5 ¼ floppy disks!

Today without printing, we can take huge numbers of pictures and share them with just about anyone at no cost. Just don’t forget that, with the cut in photography development cost, be sure to invest something so that you keep those precious memories for the next generation.

Hopefully these tips will help you. But if you’re more interested in a professional handling your photography, consider the services of Del Haven Studio, an accomplished photographer in Virginia Beach.  View their website portfolio for samples of their quality.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, March 14th, 2010 at 12:07 am and is filed under aerial photography, art photography, black and white photography, canon photography, digital cameras, fashion photography, fine art photography, glamour photography, nature photography, nikon photography, photography, photography cameras, photography digital, photography equipment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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