Tips and Tricks
Organize and Keep Your Digital Pictures Safe
Russ and Tiņa De Maris

Pictures. Hardly an RVer doesn't have at least one camera, probably more. And with the advent of digital cameras, the ease of taking pictures increases. People are snapping off shots like castanets at a flamenco dance review. But what happens then?

In the "old days," we picked up our prints from the drug store, brought them home, shared copies with friends, and maybe, just maybe, we filed our prints away in picture albums that we could blow the dust off and review somewhere down the road.

With new technology comes new problems. Just how do you file away those digital images and come back to lovingly review and caress them later? If you haven't got a system worked out yet, stick around. We have a digital direction for your pictographic puzzle.

Don't Have a PC?

If you shoot digital images and have a personal computer (PC) to which you can download your images, half the battle is won. But let's talk to those who don't have a PC. What's available? You probably take your camera's memory card to a photo finisher and have your images printed.

One way of handling that is to use the "do it yourself" machine--lots of Walmart's have them, for example--to review and make prints of images you want to keep. Slip the card in the slot, check out the images you want to save, then print the number and sizes you want. Share prints, and file others in photo albums. It's like the old days.

But in some cases you can take it a step farther--find out if your photo finisher can make up a CD of your images. That's like having negatives on hand from film-style cameras. If you want more copies of those images later, you can have the finisher print more for you.

For those with a PC, the possibilities get bigger.

Cull Those Shots!

Many of the digital shooters we talk to share a common issue: Once they've download their images to their PC, that's where they stay. Locked up on the computer, tying up space, and waiting for the Armaggedon of personal computing: A major hard drive failure. Hang on a minute! Isn't any hard drive failure a major failure? Imagine those wonderful moments of history, recorded in pictures, wiped out in an instant. The key is to organize your images, and then get them safely off the computer.

We find when we download images from our camera memory card that right then--not later--is an excellent time to do some preliminary editing. Nobody shoots everything perfectly, so why not eliminate those cut-off-heads, the not-quite-in-focus, and the, what-the-heck-is-that images that sneak into your shots. Cull without mercy, keeping your best images, the best representatives of your work.

Now with your best work ready, look over your images carefully. What will you do with them? Do you want to make up an old-style photo album with "hard copy" images? If you have printer that will make prints to your taste, use it. Side note here, if you need a new printer, don't think you'll spend a fortune getting one that makes good quality prints--the technology is fast paced, and good photo quality printers are not that expensive. Remember, the printer manufacturers make their money on ink refills, not the machine.

Other folks like to make up "e-photo albums," organizing their images in to digital images in a collected file. You can even post your pictures on the internet, on free photo sharing web sites where anyone can look them over. Or you can choose to use web sites where access to your pictures is limited to those who have the proper passcode--one that your provide, to say, friends and family. Just send them an e-mail and let them know where to look.

Still, you have those image files sitting there on your hard drive. A computer crash, a stolen computer, your precious memories can be erased in an instant. Getting those images stored off the computer, and yet still being able to find what you need, may be your best solution for long-term storage.

Organizing Images

For us, safe image storage boils down to burning and indexing. Back in the days when we shot nothing but "slides" or transparencies, our images were kept in large ring binders, slid into pages especially designed to hold our 35mm transparencies. As we got slides back from the processor, we'd cull our images to keep only the best, and then assign a file number for each slide. That number was a two-digit year code, a two-digit month code, and two-digit "roll" code. For example, the third roll of slides we'd shot in January of 1998 would be "990103." Each slide also had its own "shot" number, printed on the slide by the processor.

When we began to shoot digital images, somehow the old file number system stuck with us. Countless hours were spent assigning each image a file number, based on year and month, but since there weren't any "rolls" we got tied up in knots. It didn't take long to figure out we were "reinventing the wheel." Our camera maker automatically assigned a precise and never-repeated "image number" to each image we shot. We now use this automatically assigned image number and life is much easier.

To organize our images, we put all the images shot in a given month in a "folder" on the computer. Periodically we "burn" those images to a CD, keeping the images in their respective folders.

Thumbnails looseleaf bound for quick recall

When we shoot a lot of images, we'll burn one month's folder to a CD; where there are fewer images, we may burn two or three months onto a single CD.

But how to find the images we need later? Our method is a little more work, but worth the effort. First, our imaging software allows us to print multiple "thumbnail" images on a page. For example, on an 8 1/2 x 11 inch sheet, we can print 35 images, each with its respective file number. Those "contact sheets" can be placed in a ring binder or filed in a folder in a file cabinet. By marking the contact sheet with which CD the image is located on, coming back later to make more prints is easy.

If you shoot a lot of images, you can take it out a step farther. Using a word processor, or even better, a simple data base system, create an index of your images. You can create different "fields" of information, say for subjects, locations, dates, particular trips, and so on. Then you can search the fields looking for whatever it is you need. Of course, be sure to include information relative to the image so you can retrieve it. For us it can be as simple as the month and year the image was shot--we can track down the actual image from the contact sheet on file.

A Burning Question

Actually getting the images off your computer and onto a CD depends on your computer and software. Our main computer has a built-in CD "burner" which makes getting images off the computer a snap. We also have an auxiliary CD burner which plugs into any other computer not equipped with its own burner.

Call us overly cautious, but we don't delete the image files from the computer until after we've verified that the images were safely transferred onto the CD. We once lost over 200 images when a goof up didn't actually transfer the images to the CD. That was an expensive lesson in "go slow and double check."

Depending on how precious your images are, you might even consider making more than one CD of the same images. Keeping one set of CDs stored away at a different location could give you peace of mind. Accidents and theft happen.

Now with your images stored on CD, you can later put them back up on your computer, admire them, tweak them, print them, and share them. Your computer will have more free space available, and you can rest easier knowing your precious memories are safe.