PERSONAL STORAGE
What I like doing is using external hard drives. One to store my pics on and the other one is used to back them up. There's nothing worse than losing a day, week, month, or a year's worth of pictures that you can never get back. Trust me, I know! Now because I'm a dSLR shooter, I shoot all my pictures are in raw format. I convert each picture to 8-bit tiffs and 100% quality jpgs and store them in separate places.
Why tiffs? Jpgs are known to have a shelf life of approximately 7 years if you open them up and do some editing. Every time a jpg is saved, bits are lost. Doing this more and more will result in an error "File is corrupted. Unable to Open". Tiffs are non lossy formats and are excellent for editing as they retain all of the information when the pic was first taken. However, Tiffs do take up a lot more space and if hard drive space is an issue then, I would suggest keeping an untouched copy of your jpgs and an editing version of your jpgs which you can open and edit at your leisure.
For point and shoot camera shooters, often jpgs are the only format you can shoot in. To preserve as much information as possible, shoot in the largest megapixel resolution available in the camera. This will insure that the jpg will hold the most information.
As far as organization of your pictures go. What works for me the best is to organize my folders as below:
Folder - Month, Year
Folder - Tiffs
Folder - Jpgs
Of course many programs such as iphoto and picassa already do this for you so if you use any of these programs then what I'm blabbing is of no use to you. Then again it could be. While I do recommend programs such as iphoto, picassa, and lightroom, I also like to be in control of how my pictures are stored and where.
ONLINE STORAGE
Now if you're ready to take the plunge and venture forth into the internet to do posting, there are a lot of photo sharing sites such as Flickr. Course you have to pay a little for these sites, but for 2 bucks a month, it's hard to go wrong with one of these sharing sites. Not only do you get to meet other photographers, but you have unlimited storage and can share your pics with friends and family that way. They have great editing, organizational, and slideshow tools. You could also get your own server and host your images there as we have done with this site. The advantages to hosting elsewhere is that you can post to blogs and websites without having to worry about how much space you're taking up. For example, this is my photo blog Frank's Photo Blog using flickr as my photo hosting site. This is a long winded topic in itself and I'll elaborate further in future posts. Hopefully this is enough to chew on for now.
Now if you're ready to take the plunge and venture forth into the internet to do posting, there are a lot of photo sharing sites such as Flickr. Course you have to pay a little for these sites, but for 2 bucks a month, it's hard to go wrong with one of these sharing sites. Not only do you get to meet other photographers, but you have unlimited storage and can share your pics with friends and family that way. They have great editing, organizational, and slideshow tools. You could also get your own server and host your images there as we have done with this site. The advantages to hosting elsewhere is that you can post to blogs and websites without having to worry about how much space you're taking up. For example, this is my photo blog Frank's Photo Blog using flickr as my photo hosting site. This is a long winded topic in itself and I'll elaborate further in future posts. Hopefully this is enough to chew on for now.
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