Saving Your Images

Photo by Marion West

So how do you save your images once you’re back home with your memory cards filled with precious images?

First if you’ve been out shooting all day consider whether it might be wiser to do this important job the next day after a good night’s rest. Don’t ask why I know this to be important LOL.*

So once you’re home and rested take the memory cards out of your camera and using a card reader transfer all the images to a folder on your computer. Name that folder something unique so you can find your images again easily days even years later.

Now make a second copy on an external hard drive or on a properly named folder on your online cloud drive such as ICloud or One Drive. I’m still old school and like hard drives but they do fail over time. In 10 years I’ve had almost a 50% failure rate.

The issue with cloud drives is if your cloud provider goes out of business then you may lose all your images. Also you need really decent high-speed Internet speeds. Here in Oakville the Cogeco 1 gig service is amazing and makes this seamless.

So now check that the images are actually on your two devices or places and then, and only then, can you go back and put your memory cards back into the camera and format the cards.

Always format the memory card in the device it’s going to be used with. Sometimes cards formatted in let’s say a computer won’t just work right going into a camera.

Here’s my setup: Memory card images or black and white scanned images go into a folder on my computer’s hard drive that is clearly labelled by name of event and date. From there a copy is sent to my two duplicate network memory drives. These drives from Synology will automatically update themselves and are replaceable. Plugged into the back of this machine are two external hard drives which I manually store my saved folders. So essentially I end up with my images on four separate drives and my computer.

*Aside from one recent disaster where after I loaded my images from a memory card to Alien Skin’s rather nice Exposure 7 software moments before it updated itself erasing all my images I haven’t lost a frame in almost two decades.

BTW I’ve also burned DVDs with important family photos as it’s way easier to accidentally delete digital files than film that just sits in a drawer.

Finally if you’re really having a lot of fun consider printing your own images. A decent dedicated photo printer will cost between $300 to $1000+ but there’s nothing like seeing your own images being printed on your own printer. A good printer can produce prints that will last for a century or more.