It is a backwards "Works for Me Wednesday," in which I get the opportunity to ask your advice. Please help me, pretty please?
No, not space away from my children (although that would be nice sometimes), but on my computer.
You see, I have an elderly laptop with only 18GB hard-drive. I also have a digital camera addiction. Blame it on record snowfalls and some really cute kids, but I took 643 pictures in February alone.
I have defragmented, done a "disk cleanup," and deleted duplicate files. And we are still at 97% capacity. There is17.44GB stored on the computer.
Short of buying a new computer or external drive, what can I do? What do the rest of you camera hounds do with your pics?
More Questions: Who can view pictures on online storage sites like Shutterfly or Picasa? I would be a little skeeved if total strangers could see pictures of my kids taking a bubble bath.... Can I somehow ban strangers while giving Grandma permission?
Wednesday, March 05, 2008
WFMW: Help me Find Some Space
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
12 comments:
Get a thumb drive, they are relatively cheap. I've got my eye on a nice little 4GB USB thumb drive at amazon for $25
http://tinyurl.com/2tst9m
Ge those babies off your computer!
Seriously though, hard drives can crash and you will lose all those precious pics. Cheapest way is to burn them on a disk. Just burn copies of those disks too, cause those fail as well.
Take it from an actual photog who has dealt with losing pictures (luckily mine and not a clients) Burn, burn. burn!
Try and make it a practice once a week or once a month to burn off any pics you've taken recently.
If you wanna keep a few on your hard drive for bloggy reasons, just downsize those and save. (but put the origianl full size pic on a disk first)
I agree with Donielle here. I recently just lost all my photo to a portable hard drive that we thought will be our photo storage. These hardwares have life span and once it crashed no amount of $$$ can fix it. We even sent it to data recovery company and unfortunately they can't fix it. So burn them to your CD. Another option is upload it to Shutterfly. They have unlimited storage space. But I suggest do that for the pictures that you already go through and pick the ones you like. I was able to get some pictures throughout the year because I uploaded it to shutterfly.
Besides putting my pictures on a thumb drive or CD every few months (which I then put in my firesafe!), I also upload them to an internet photo storage site. I use picasaweb since I use Picasa to organize my photos and it is really easy to upload to picasaweb. This way, if anything happens to my computer, my pictures are still ok. And picasaweb has a pretty large free storage amount. Plus, it is easy to share the pictures when I want to.
If you're burning, I would burn them to DVDs - far more space than CDs.
As far as sites go, Flickr and Picasa have privacy settings. You could even choose to upload them as backups and set everything to private, just to get them off of your computer. But for Grandma to see the pictures, she'd have to create an account for either. Some places like Kodak Web Gallery and other commercial places that like to sell prints of photos, access to pictures is based on e-mail invitation.
At my house, we have an extra hard drive for our music, and another for photos. Much easier to do in a desktop computer than a laptop!
I download to CD's as soon as possible and I've also just started uploading to photobucket. I believe they have a way to keep you photos from being viewed by the public.
My favorite approach is using a USB thumb drive for short term storage and burning 2 copies to disk at least once per year.
Let me know what works for you..I do back up on a disk...once a month.
If you go with a photo-sharing site for storage, make extra sure you choose one that allows you to recover your original, high-resolution images in the future. Many (especially the free ones), will save your images at a smaller resolution or prevent you from retrieving them from their site if you don't pay a fee.
Almost all sites will have security options where you can protect your photos from random gawkers using a password.
Disclaimer: I work for SmugMug.com (my family's business) and we get people all the time who have been jaded by free sites that they used in the past. SmugMug lets you have unlimited storage, we keep copies of your original high-resolution files that you can have back at any time. We're not free, though I think it's well worth the money! :)
I use both a thumb drive and burn copies onto DVD's (I burn 3 copies- one for us, one for grandma, and one to keep in the safe at brother's house.- I make sure to get seperate copies in different houses -grandma's, brother's in case of hurricane or such) I also use Snapfish. It has unlimited storage, its free and your photos can only be viewed by invitation only (an added benefit is that you can order hard copies for $.09 cents a piece and you can do touch ups, tinting, boarders.... you can even make them into books or collages! And it's an invitation to each individual album as opposed to your whole account. So if you take funny pics of your kids picking their nose and Uncle Billy doesn't like nose pickers you just don't send him the email announcement that you have new photos to share. I share about 3-4 albums weekly with family and friends, goes to show you how many pics I take!!! Good luck and save those pictures quick before your computer tanks on you!
I would highly recommend spending money and buy an external harddisk. If you are planning to keep on shooting photos and burning them on CDs, the cost will add up over time and become more expensive and less reliable than actually just going out and getting a 300GB external hard disk that can last you for years. Plus, all the CDs will take up space, then you'll have a storage problem.
I would just get rid of the kids and move to Florida.
or
DVD's are the way to go. Stable format. Lots of room.
Post a Comment