Key Post: Saving digital images

T

tedd

Guest
Hello all,

I wonder if anyone can advise me about what the best way to save digital pictures is?

I have been taking lots of digital pictures and need to save them. I have a vague idea that if I just keep saving them onto my computer it will get filled up fairly quickly. Is this true? I know I have heard of people buying CD writers for this sort of situation, but I have no experience in this sort of thing, so any advice would be great.

FYI... I have a Samsung 210 Digimax camera and the computer is a Sony Vaoi PCG-F 403 with i.link, dvd-rom drive, floppy disk drive, 64 MB SDRAM and 6GB HD (not absolutely certain what all this means, I'm copying it off the labels!)

thanks to anyone who can advise!

tedd
 
Re: Saving digital images

Hi Tedd - I haven't dived into the digital camera market yet myself, so I'm speaking in general terms here. A 6 GB hard disk drive is by no means huge. Most of the retail PC's that you will see for sale today would start at 20 GB. If you take off a few GB's for your operating system & applications, you won't have loads of space left over. You should also think about the safety of these pictures on your hard disk drive. Hard disk drives do fail or get corrupted from time to time. If the pictures have sentimental or commercial value to you, you should really arrange to hold a seperate copy in some other format.

The most practical solution is probably a CD-RW drive. I'm not sure if Sony make one of these for the Vaio range, or if you'd need to get a 3rd party one. The alternative to a CD drive would be an Iomega Zip drive. This might be a few quid cheaper, but would have smaller capacity and you would also lose the ability to work with audio CD's.

Just one other point for you to consider - The spec of your laptop is relatively low in terms of memory & disk space. If you're comfortable that it meets your needs for next couple of years, then no further action is required. I'd just hate to see you buying a CD RW now, then upgrading your memory in six months time, then upgrading your disk drive in 12 months time. You just might be better off taking the plunge and buying a nice new PC with built-in CD-RW and additional RAM & disk now, instead of paying out in dribs & drabs.

Hope this helps - RainyDay
 
storage

get yourself an external firewire hard drive and archive to that via your i-link connector.
 
Re: Saving digital images

Thanks for all the replies!

Unfortunately I can't afford to upgrade the laptop for at least one year (it's only 2 years old!) but the problem with the digital images is an immediate one. Security of the images is a major issue for me as they are not easily reproducible if lost.

I'm looking through the various options mentioned and I will post back when I understand enough to ask a few questions!

tedd
 
Re: Saving digital images

Tedd,

Further options include managing the 6M available on your laptop. This would involve uninstalling any applications which you no longer need to free up further disk space. You could also do a trawl for old spreadsheet and word processing documents and archive them off to floppy. However, this still leaves your images on a hard disk which is liable to fail over time. Bear in mind that the estimated time between failures for these types of devices are measured in the millions of hours/days/weeks so it's not exactly a huge risk.

Another option would be to bring your laptop to some copy/print-type shop and see if they have any mechanism available to connect your laptop to their network so that you can copy your images to their network and get them to burn it from there. Haven't heard of such an operation here, but it's exactly the type of service which should be available.

Remember that while a CD copy of your images is more secure than a copy on your hard drive, you can still lose or break a CD, so if the images have commercial/sentimental/legal value and you *must* retain a copy then you should get more than one CD burnt and store one copy safely somewhere.

z
 
Disk compression

<!--EZCODE BOLD START--> Further options include managing the 6M available on your laptop<!--EZCODE BOLD END-->

Don't forget that (at least on Windows installations using NTFS filesystems) you can choose to compress selected files/directories - right click on the relevant file/directory, choose <!--EZCODE ITALIC START--> Properties...<!--EZCODE ITALIC END--> from the context menu, click the <!--EZCODE ITALIC START--> Advanced...<!--EZCODE ITALIC END--> button and check the <!--EZCODE ITALIC START--> Compress contents to save disk space<!--EZCODE ITALIC END--> checkbox. If you selected a folder for compression then you will be asked if you want to compress all sub-folders and files below. This may help - on the other hand already compressed files (e.g. certain graphics file formats) will probably not benefit from further compression. Try it if possible and see if this helps to optimise your disk space usage.
 
Re: Saving digital images

Tedd, if you want a cheap parallel drive with 3Gb of storage disks, ring 061-204345.....
 
Re: Saving digital images

Thanks for all the great suggestions.
I have been rooting away at the laptop and have discarded or compressed as much as possible, so I have almost 3M free. So the immediate future is ok, but the comments about image security/backup have convinced me to do something as I would lose a lot of work if I had a problem with the laptop. I am more inclined towards an external CD writer at the moment.

Dumdum,
Sorry to be thick but what exactly is a "parallel drive" and how does it work? (ie: is it a CD/zip or something else entirely?)Thanks tedd
 
Re: Saving digital images

Tedd, basically 'parallel port' means an external, portable box of a thing (about the size of a book) that plugs into your computer where the printer normally would (and then you can connect the printer to its 'out' port, daisy-chain style). That means you can move it between different computers, unlike an internal drive. Mine's a 'Superdisk' drive — basically the same thing as a Zip drive, but each diskette holds 120Mb each (as opposed to 100Mb for the Zip disks. And I have 30 of them!)

This isn't really a 'small ads' board, so I won't plug any further ;) — but if you drop me a line at [email protected] I can fill you in further. I had a similar problem to yours and this thing tided me over brilliantly until now. I just bought a new computer with a built-in CD rewriter ...which is why I'm flogging the other!

All the best,
Darach (since you now know my real name anyway!)
 
ZIP drives

<!--EZCODE BOLD START--> basically the same thing as a Zip drive, but each diskette holds 120Mb each (as opposed to 100Mb for the Zip disks.<!--EZCODE BOLD END-->

There are also 250MB ZIP disks/drives available. A 250MB ZIP drive can use 250MB and 100MB (albeit slower) media. A 100MB ZIP drive can only use 100MB ZIP disks. I've been using them for several years now without any problems (I think iomega must have sorted out the "click of death" problem which plagued some of the 100MB ZIP drives a few years ago but the mud has stuck...). However for archiving/backing up larger amounts of data I guess a CD-R (recordable) or CD-RW (rewriteable) might be a better bet. Further than that you're into tape territory! Just my tuppence worth....
 
Zip drives et al

You have received a lot of very useful advice which is certainly very worthwhile, but the basics of saving images in a confined space,comes back to the format you use.
Digital images use lots of mb if saved in their standard format,but you can significantly reduce the amount of memory required by saving to the "jpeg" format.
The purists will say this reduces the quality, but if the images are not for exhibition purposes then saving to "jpeg" will reduce your storage requirement by up to
60%.
xocal
 
Digital picture formats

<!--EZCODE BOLD START--> Digital images use lots of mb if saved in their standard format<!--EZCODE BOLD END-->

I don't know anything about digital photography - just out of curiousity, what is the "standard format" used?
 
Re: Digital picture formats

Hi,
The standard format tends to be "Windows BMP Image" which uses up MB of memory compared to "jpeg" which uses only kb's for the the same size image.
To check what format your images are saved to , right click on the image icon.Select properties. This will throw up a window which will tell you what format is used and the amount of memory used.
You can change it by opening the image ,click file, save as, and in the save window click the arrow in bottom right hand corner, select jpeg.from drop down menu by clicking on it then click save.
If a window comes up asking if you wish to replace the original, say yes.
If you follow this procedure for all your images, you'll free up acres of space on your hard drive.
I hope I'm not "teaching my granny to suck eggs" to quote an old saying ,but this really does work.
Rgds
xocal
 
Digital picture formats

Register with www.photobox.ie and you can have 30Mb of disk space to store your photos. If you order prints of the images they increase your allocation to 100Mb. Maybe worth a look
 
digital pics

How about trying a local internet cafe -
some offer word processing, printing etc as well and maybe you'll find somewhere to just burn your images to a CD ?
Laoise
 
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