A random thought just hit me. If a family has a new baby today, their entire photographic existence will be all digital!
No negatives or backup of any kind, unless you're really into backing up your PC or making hard copies of your digital photos.
I'm into scanning my old photos and archiving them for safe keeping, but today do you really have a choice?

I think digital copies are just as safe as the old negatives, honestly.

Just makes sure you copy your photos to more than one source (perhaps more than one flash drive), a DVD/CD, and a few printed copies. The printed copies can be rescanned and 'corrected' with software far easier and with better results than in the old days.

I make hardcopies that I keep in albums, each kid has their own album so when they grow up and move out they can take it with them.

I used to keep negatives in a box for safe keeping, and now my favourite photos I upload to flickr in case I lose a photo, I keep res big enough to make 4"x6" for back-up purposes.

I have a problem with this. I recently burned some pics to CD-R for my parents and they were automatically resized. I wasn't given any options beforehand and I couldn't find anywhere I could make sure they were burned exactly as is without loss.

Fauxie said:

What the hell kind of software did you use?

TheVoid said:

Just put the CD-R in the machine, opened the drive, selected all pics and dragged them into the drive to burn. It did come up with this High-MAT option which I chose. Is that important? I thought it would be a high quality option or something, not that my pics would be resized.

Fauxie said:

Just treat them as files being stored.
If any of that crap comes up asking about image attributes then cancel out.

Then again, you're on a Windows system so it may be hopeless either way.

TheVoid said:

Thanks.

I'm thinking maybe I'll just get an external hard drive to back-up my images. Can't be more than 3 or 4k baht for a few hundred GBs of storage, surely.

The only problem I can see in that regard is just that film still looks a whole lot better.

novabrkr said:

I kind a agree with you. I have OLD pictures of my mom and dad, my grand and great grandparents and so forth. If someone's life is recorded digitally, yes they will be able to preserve the memory much better than a faded negative or photo, but I don't believe there is enough talk about how to best preserve your digital photos.
PC's crash, get stolen, break etc. A burglar rarely breaks into a home and goes straight for your photos!

I see most folks take their photos for granted and figure they will always be there.
I've learned the hard way and back them up immediately. I also invested in a photo printer.
[Edited 2/12/10 8:30am]

Great topic. I have several external hd's that I like to keep my digital music and photo's on. I also copy them to dvd/cd when I can but I like archiving them. I love to look at my kids pics from 5 years ago on vacations and send them to people we were with in emails and say "Hey, remember these fun times?" I love the simplicity of it. I too have been taking old pics and scanning them in to my hd.
You can always transfer to a flash drive and take with you to share/give to someone else simply.

I almost bought another digital camera yesterday but didn't like the reviews. I have an old hp and my wife has a nice pentax. We also have jvc hd that takes video and pics really nice so I didn't think I needed another camera but the price was really good for a 12mp.

i love photos, so i always save my digital ones to a few different places, and print out the extra special ones.

Fauxie said:

HighMAT is fairly new to most people. It's another proprietary Microsoft licensed interface that's being adopted by DVD manufactures as an "easier" GUI for CD-R reading of photos and music. If you're getting resized pics, turn off or uninstall the HighMAT software and use your regular optical disc write software to burn a data CD-R. I wouldn't rely on a HD as your only back-up since they have moving parts and often fail.

squirrelgrease said:

Ah, I thought it might be something to do with that. Thanks! I'll give that a go.

I should just burn to DVD though, right? Not sure why I was thinking of backing up my stuff on CD-R when I could fit all of my photos on a couple of DVDs.