Archiving Digital Files

The world of digital photography adds a new dimension to organizing and retrieving pictures. A consistent, simple file management system can simplify printing and sharing. The easiest way to archive digital pictures: After you have filled your digital media and deleted the pictures you don’t want, simply bring the media in to our lab. Order the prints and a CD of the media. The CD then becomes your negatives for your pictures. Create a filing system at your home or office for the CD’s for easy retrieval and printing. Store your CD’s on a shelf or area away from direct sunlight or high temperatures and treat them as you would a negative or slide. This system saves time by completely bypassing any additional steps of downloading to your computer, and organizing the digital files. Your Hard Drive is a temporary storage device A hard drive is a mechanical device. The life of a hard drive is measured in MTBF (Mean Time Before Failure) the average MTBF of all hard drives is 3-10 years. However, a much more useful reference point is the length of the manufacturer’s warranty. Some will last longer; some will fail long before this time period. In addition the average PC user will upgrade, or purchase a new PC about every two years. Planning to archive all of your data to CD or DVD on a monthly basis is highly recommended. Use your hard drive as temporary storage to organize your images before archiving. Simple Concise File Management Use only simple short names for folders and files. The key behind good file management is the use of folders named by time period and event. Create a folder for the year. Inside that folder create folders for each month. Inside the monthly folders create a folder for each event. Inside the event folder create folders for each subcategory of that event. Then let the file names be whatever the camera assigns the picture within each final folder. When you have to name a picture file other than what the camera assigns, try to keep the number of the total characters under 12. Example: Camera names a picture, IMG057.jpg Rename the file 001Py010503.jpg this is a code for: first image of the Party that was held on January 5th 2003. Whatever system you come up with will work, but make sure you can explain your system to our lab. By using the numbering system of three digits starting with 001, 002, 003, 004 the files will stay in the order that you designated. Followed by your coded description.