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Proven Steps to Preserving Your Pictures

Many of our memories are best preserved in our collection of pictures. Those of us who are older remember the admonition to keep the negatives so other pictures could be printed. The younger generation doesn’t even know what a negative is! So how can I preserve my digital memories?

First, don’t be shy about taking plenty of pictures. With massive memory storage capabilities today, we don’t have to worry about the expense of taking an overexposed picture or fumbling with rolls of film. To prepare for a recent trip to visit relatives, I purchased a camera with a four gig card. When I got home, I still had room to take more than 10,000 shots!

After collecting your photos, don’t be shy about deleting ones you don’t want for whatever reason. Don’t feel you have to keep every picture. However, you may want to keep some that contain special people, poses, or memories, even if they aren’t the best. After all, it doesn’t cost anything to keep it except memory.

Computer programs allow you to set up electronic photo albums and catalog the pictures in whatever way you want. Be sure to identify each picture as to place, time, event. I have boxes of slides my parents took in Europe but I don’t have any idea where they were taken. If they had labeled them clearly, they would be much more useful.

You may think you are done now. But take a second to think about the fragility of your memories. If they only exist on your hard drive, it only takes one crash and all is lost! If they are on floppy disks, you might not even have the media to read them any more! Floppies are also vulnerable to magnetic fields.

At first, when CDs came out, everyone thought they were much more indestructible than floppies. Since nothing needed to touch the surface, nothing wore out. But now we see that scratches or breaks are much too easy and again the memories can be lost.

One answer to this is storing your photos in several places and several locations. If you store them on a CD, for example, keep copies at another home, at work, or in a safety deposit box. Be sure to back up your hard drives and, if possible, subscribe to a service that backs up your data on a server somewhere else. As the media changes, be sure to transfer the pictures to the new media, lest it become unavailable. Imagine what you would now have if all your past pictures were stored on 5 ¼ floppy disks!

Today we can take and distribute, without printing, more pictures than people care to see. Just don’t forget that, with the cut in photography development cost, be sure to invest something so that you keep those precious memories for the next generation.

Hopefully these tips will help you. But if you’re more interested in a professional handling your photography, consider the services of Del Haven Studio, an accomplished Virginia Beach Portrait Photographer. View their website portfolio for samples of their quality.

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