Where Are Your Digital Photos?

The advent of digital photography has led to more pictures being taken, fewer pictures being developed and picture archives measured by the gigabyte. But digital pictures are vulnerable. Now that your memories can be reduced to binary code as nothing more than a bunch of 1s and 0s, how are we taking care of them? How should we be taking care of them?

There are four main formats of digital photo storage.

1. Your computer hard drive - convenient, but not very safe, just in case you have a meltdown.
2. CD-R - Cheap, reliable, but slightly fragile
3. Flash Memory - Small, getting cheaper, but proprietary usually to the brand of camera you have right now.
4. Somewhere on the Internet - There are lot’s of places to store and print your photos. From Wal-Mart and Target to Snapfish and Kodak. And who can ignor Flickr? Easy to share with others, but feels a little like sleeping on your brother-in-law’s couch. Your stuff’s just out there, somewhere.

Don’t trust your computer hard drive. Please. There are just too many things that can go wrong. And since, on average, we as technology users are only printing about 15% of the photos we take with digital cameras, there are a lot memories locked up on your vulnerable hard drive.

Since CD-Rs are the single most popular format for archiving digital photos, Allsop has a few options to make things easier. The Photo CD Gift Envelope let’s you safely send a disc in the mail, but in the form of a greeting card complete with places to write personal message and display your favorite photo. The Photo Disc Album, let’s you keep 20 CD-Rs in one place. It is small and will keep your photos close at hand. Our other photo disc storage products are for archiving. These are great when you’re ready to stick your photo library somewhere for safe keeping.

For flash memory there are memory sticks, SM cards, USB flash drives. If you are using one of these: good for you. They are great for sharing and moving files around, but I’m not sold on them for long term archiving. It’ll require a whole new system of organizing and storage.

As much memory as you might be taking up with digital pictures, just wait until you start taking up even more space with digital home videos. Get in the habit of archiving and backing your system up. It can save a ton of headache in the future.