Make sure you Back Up your Digital Photographs

Storage of digital photographs is easier and more affordable than ever, with great options available to suit everyone’s needs. Image storage is a very important topic, can you imagine losing all those family memories or those digital photographs that you have spent hours getting “perfect”?
Believe me you do not want to experience image loss. I will share a personal story and some pictures with you at the end of this post.
It is important to remember that if you have your images stored on the same device (no matter how many copies you have) you simply don’t have a back-up copy. This may sound obvious but it is often the simple things in life that can bring us unstuck. So what are your options?
Storing your digital photographs to CD offers a safe, convenient and cost efficient method. You can have your images on your computer hard drive and back them up regularly to CD, most computers have an internal CD burner (if it doesn’t you can purchase an external burner for as little as $100.00).
There are two types of recordable CD available: CD-R and CD-RW. The R stands for recordable and the RW stands for re-writable. With a CD-R disc you can record until the disc is full, but you cannot remove an image once it is full. This is my preference of CD because you cannot make a mistake and delete an image. With a CD-RW you can write data (digital photographs) and then if you choose you can remove and add images ongoing. The manufactures of CD-R claim they will last as long as 100 years, while CD-RW will start to degrade after around 30 years.
The upside is they are cheap, so be extra safe and make an extra copy of those important images. The major down side of CD storage is the capacity, which is fixed to around 700 megabites of data. So let’s have a look at using DVD as a storage device (DVD stands for digital video disc). A big difference between CD and DVD is storage capacity: CD = 700MB and DVD = 4.7 Gigabites. However the lifespan of DVDs is not as long as CDs, and you can experience some difficulties with both writing and reading DVDs with some computers.
In the Studio we use DVDs as one of three methods to back all of our images (along with hard drives and external hard drives).
As we discussed in our last post you can hold vast amounts of data on memory cards which is fantastic, but I think it’s a great (and safe) idea to download your digital photographs whenever you can. For example you can download your pics to your desk top computer, your lap top computer, or a portable storage unit. Remember memory cards can be damaged or lost, and those important photographs are gone forever!
There are a range of portable hard drives available that are brilliant when you are travelling and away from your computer. Some of these multimedia storage viewers have 10cm screens so you can view your photographs and even edit and connect to a printer for instant output. They have storage capacity up to 160 Gigabites, which works perfectly when you are back from your photographic safari as an external hard-drive.
I have owned an Epson multimedia storage device for number of years and it has been sensational. I use it to download and backup wedding images on the fly, and it has travelled to Saudi Arabia, America, China, Indonesia, Thailand and around Australia with me backing up images as I shoot them in the field.

Epson multi meadia player

Now back to that horrible experience I had while on assignment in Broome. I was photographing at the very beautiful Eco Beach Wilderness Retreat in Broome and had completed a full day of shooting and filled a number of compact flash cards. Unfortunately I decided to download the images to the Art Directors laptop before downloading to my Epson and his card reader had a bent pin which shorted the card and corrupted the images. This card had all of the days aerial photographs on which were shot from a helicopter that was costing the client $600.00 per hour and we were unable to reschedule the chopper. So you can imagine how fast my pulse was racing when we could not open one image.
Fortunately there is a happy ending. The technology boffins at Team Digital were able to rescue the images and here are a few of them. Thank goodness. Here are some of the images that were recovered from the damaged memory card. Images by Lloyd-Smith Photographics.

Aerial photography in Roebuck Bay Broome

Beach walk at Eco Beach Resort shot from a chopper

Fishing in Broome

Admiring the view at Eco Beach Resort Broome

Capturing and Storing your Digital Files

Digital cameras use removable storage cards to capture and store images. There are quite a variety of memory cards available, but it isn’t too confusing deciding which one you need because most digital cameras only use one sort.

Some of the more popular memory cards include;

SD (Secure Digital) which are a very popular memory card type as they are small, reliable, and have a high capacity.

SDHC (Secure Digital High Capacity) which look identical to an SD card, however these memory cards employ a new technology, giving them a greater capacity than SD cards. You should be aware that while you are able to us SD cards n the majority of cameras that support SDHC the same is not true in reverse so make sure you check before purchasing one.

Compact Flash cards are in larger, high end digital cameras and they come in a very wide variety of storage capabilities scaling all the way up to 16 gigabites of picture data.

Some camera manufacturers have their own memory devices like the xD-Picture Card designed by Fuji and Olympus, and Sony’s Memory Stick.

It is always wise to read through your digital cameras manual (I know it can be boring and sometimes a little confusing but you may learn a few things and can save you some heartache and frustration) to see what maximum capacity memory card your camera will allow because some older cameras won’t accept new high capacity memory cards.

Speed is also worth looking at when purchasing a memory card. Speed refers to the time it takes for your images to be recorded onto the card and how long for the images to be downloaded onto your computer. You can view the speed which is marked on the card with a number and an x sign : 66x, 90x, 133x etc. The higher the number, the faster the memory card. Speed is important when you are shooting a lot of pictures quickly because if the card is too slow there will be a delay between pictures as the image takes time to buffer. So if you hate missing pictures (I know I do) then go for the fastest card speed possible.

As a professional photographer who shoots enormous numbers of images every week, it is important to employ efficient digital asset management systems. Now that is simply a fancy way of saying  I need to store and catalogue my images. Now you may not have as many images as me to worry about but as your photographic library increases you will need to think about where to store your pictures.  So that’s what we will discuss next and show you how not to bog your poor old computer down to a snails pace.

Compact Flash memory card

SD Secure Digital memory card