Storeage & file sizes

melanie

melanie

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Sorry if this is the wrong place for this question.
My laptop started doing things the other day that our IT guy at work says MIGHT mean it's about to drop dead on me. So I'm starting to worry about losing all my photos. Sometimes I save some onto CDs, but it takes ages and I don't like the fact that they're not all in one place.
What do you lot do for storeage? I can't afford one, but if I thought it was worthwhile I'd try to wangle one for my birthday or something.
Also, all the pictures I've taken in the year that I've owned a digital camera have been at 7.3 megapixels, just because that's the default. I realise that unless I'm printing out posters this is probably unnecessary, and taking up more space than it should, but I'm not clear about what would be a good size to go for.
The biggest prints I ever do are something like 12x15 inches, and that's only for something I really love, but I don't know at the time I'm shooting it that I'm going to really love it. So I'd rather do everything as large as necessary just to be on the safe side, but as small as necessary from a space-saving point of view.
Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
Cheers.
 
I backup all my shots to an external hard drive and also put them onto dvd's.

You can buy external hard drives for less than £60 now, which is worth it for piece of mind.
 
Get yourself an external hard drive before you end up disappointed. You can get a good Lacie one on Dabs 120gb USB2 for under £50 this is more than enough for you to store 17,000 pics I would do it before it's too late.

Cheers
Bill
 
That's sound advice. I have a Lacie external HD - highly recommended btw. I use my iPod as a backup too, just incase. (I've heard of people who had two drives fail within a week!)
 
Thanks for that chaps.
Can anybody advise about the file sizing part of my query?
 
melanie said:
Can anybody advise about the file sizing part of my query?
Click to expand...
melanie said:
Also, all the pictures I've taken in the year that I've owned a digital camera have been at 7.3 megapixels, just because that's the default. I realise that unless I'm printing out posters this is probably unnecessary, and taking up more space than it should, but I'm not clear about what would be a good size to go for.
The biggest prints I ever do are something like 12x15 inches, and that's only for something I really love, but I don't know at the time I'm shooting it that I'm going to really love it. So I'd rather do everything as large as necessary just to be on the safe side, but as small as necessary from a space-saving point of view.
Click to expand...
Melanie, I think we'll need some more information before we can help you.

I assume that, since you've got some sort of compact camera, the images come out of it as JPEGs, yes? Do you have options regarding the JPEG quality setting in the camera? If so, which do you use? How big are your JPEGs, on average?

I have a Canon 350D which is 8 megapixels. High-quality 8mp JPEGs come out at about 3.3MB each, and low-quality 8mp JPEGs come out at about 1.7MB each. For images on the web both are fine, but for large prints I think the high-quality setting is needed. I always use the highest quality setting, like you, because I never know when I'm going to take a picture that I'll want to enlarge.

But storage is cheap. You can buy a 500GB external hard drive for under £70. At 3.3MB each, I get 300 images per GB, so 500GB will hold 150,000 images. How many do you have?
 
Hi Stewart
I THINK I can change the JPEG quality before I acutally take the photo - there are 3 "quality" settings of some sort, so I assume that's what they mean. But I haven't tried changing it before.
I've always used the highest quality setting and the highest mp setting which is 7.1.
My files seem to usually be less than 3mb - 2.7/2.8 ish.
Since gettinga couple of replies to this I had a look at some hard drives and yes, I'm sure everybody is right that this is what I need. So the minute I have £70 to spare I'm going to go for it.
At the moment I've only got about 4000 photos to store, so it'll take me a while to fill the 500gig one!
Cheers for the reply.
 
Melanie, storage is cheap and getting cheaper all the time. Take your photos at the biggest and best quality you can, you can always make a smaller copy if needed but a shot taken at low resolution cannot easily be improved afterwards.
 
probably the best thing you can do is go through your pictures and delete the truly dire and duplicates before backing up. Then another option would be to get a usb DVD burner for about £30ish (or an internal one if you can fit) and back the pictures up. Can fit around 4-5gb per disk then. When you have more cash get a nice big fat external HD.
 
Steep said:
Melanie, storage is cheap and getting cheaper all the time. Take your photos at the biggest and best quality you can, you can always make a smaller copy if needed but a shot taken at low resolution cannot easily be improved afterwards.
Click to expand...

Sound advice.:thumbs:
 
If I go through and delete all the rubbish pics, I'll be able to fit what's left on 4.5" floppy disk! (if you can still get them) :lol:

thanks for the advice everyone.
 
:lol: lots of us have that problem!
 
walls said:
probably the best thing you can do is go through your pictures and delete the truly dire and duplicates before backing up. Then another option would be to get a usb DVD burner for about £30ish (or an internal one if you can fit) and back the pictures up. Can fit around 4-5gb per disk then. When you have more cash get a nice big fat external HD.
Click to expand...

I do just the same delete the sh... rubbish back up to computer keep them on here for a year daily back up to external HD then to DVD :thumbs: works for me
 
keep all the pics . dont delete any of them . in twenty years time you will go back over them , and although they might be *rubbish * there will still be some you 'ill like .
 
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