The Kenningtons

Digital Cameras for Teachers

Downloading, Storing and Viewing Photos

Storing and Archiving Your Photos

There are a number of ways to archive photos, depending on your equipment.

Store on your computer hard drive

Burn to CD (Create a data CD using software)

Burn to DVD (Create a data DVD using software)

Your downloading software may have ideas on how to store your photos. Some software will produce a separate, dated folder for each download you make. Usually photos are labelled numerically, so you may want to rename them as you download them. You can create separate download folders for categories such as:

Family

Friends

Vacations

Landscapes

Sports, etc.

If you have more than one digital camera, you can also create separate folders for each camera.

Will you need another hard drive? Becoming a digital photo enthusiast means that you will never have enough hard drive space. Graphic image files are among the largest files of all, and if you have a high-quality, high-resolution camera that takes photos in tiff or RAW mode, a hard drive can fill up fast.This becomes even more true when you start including digital video! The prices of digital video cameras are coming down, and even inexpensive digital cameras have video modes on them.

Uncompressed .avi or .mov files (video and Quicktime files, respectively) take up gigabytes of space, while the compressed mpeg files are smaller. Keeping your photos safe If you are concerned about your computer crashing and losing your precious photo files, consider the following:

Add a separate hard drive for storing only photos. Hard drives now are huge and have come down quite a bit in price, making this option more affordable Partition, or divide your hard drive into two or more sections so you have a section dedicated to your system files and software installations, with the other partition dedicated to data such as graphic images. You can set up a partition when you format your hard drive (this destroys all the data and all software will need to be reinstalled!) or you can use software such as Partition Magic.

Burn your photos on CD. Remember that CDs hold from 650-700 MB of data. For this you will need a CD burner and blank CD-Rs. The CD burner should come bundled with burning software such as Nero or Roxio CD Creator. You will need to know where you have stored your folders in order to direct the burning software to know what files you want on your CD. It would be helpful to include a copy of image viewer and organizer software (listed on the next lesson page) on your CD compilation.

Burn your images on a DVD. DVD-R format holds 4.7 GB of data, while some multiple layer DVD+R can be burned on both sides, giving you 9 GB of data backup. DVDs are especially useful for slide shows and digital video, which can take up immense amounts of drive space. Software such as Nero Vision Express and Roxio Easy Media Creator can help you create DVD files that you can watch on your TV's DVD player..

For links to commercial CD & DVD burning software, freeware, photo editing and digital imaging cataloguing software, visit:

Digital Imaging Software Links Page

Digital Cameras for Teachers

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