When is the last time you put a roll of film in your camera to take some photographs? Can you even remember? If you’re like most people, it’s been a very long time since you used an “analog” film camera to take pictures, if you’ve ever even used a film camera in the first place.
Ironically, it was Eastman Kodak’s invention of the electronic camera in 1975 that led to the company’s filing for bankruptcy in 2012. The empire founded by George Eastman in 1888 became increasingly less relevant as digital photography became accepted and then preferred by the masses. In the 1990s and years following, digital video developed rapidly along the same lines, pioneered by Hollywood luminaries like George Lucas and Steven Spielberg. Soon, VHS and Betamax videocassette recorders and their attendant “camcorders” were replaced by digital counterparts. Today, most people use a most unlikely device to create digital photographs and video: their phones.
For most consumers, all photos and videos are done digitally, either with dedicated cameras, or using smart phones. If these methods describe you, I encourage you to seriously consider how you store and manage your digital images. If not stored and managed properly, you risk losing your precious digital memories forever.
First off, do not use your cameras or phones as the main devices where you store your photos. Cameras and phones tend to be lost, crushed, stolen, dropped in toilets and blown away in tornados. The memory cards in these devices are, for the most part, super-cheap, mass-produced junk and should not be considered to be reliable for long-term storage. As with all prudent file-backup plans, your digital images should reside in three different places: on your computer’s hard drive, on an external storage device like an external hard drive, and with an Internet-based “cloud” file storage service like Carbonite, Microsoft’s OneDrive or Google Drive.
Once you have securely backed up your files, many folks will also turn to various photo management and sharing programs like Photoshop, Picasa and Flikr. While your photos may seem wonderful at first, it is likely you will eventually want to crop their size, change the brightness or, if you have a large number of files, sort them into groups and categories based upon date or subject matter.
The most popular photo editing program in the world is Adobe Photoshop. Photoshop has been widely used in the professional photography and publishing worlds for many years, but for most people, the cost is prohibitive. For them, the next best thing is Photoshop Elements, also an Adobe product, and available for an affordable price. Photoshop Elements will allow you to change the appearance of your photos in a number of useful ways. It will also allow you to easily change the digital (not visual) size of your photos, reducing the number of kilobytes or megabytes they use, making sending them as email attachments a much more practical proposition.
If you find yourself accumulating hundreds or thousands of digital photos, you will most likely want a way to sort, rename and catorigize them. You can choose to do this the old-fashioned way by using your computer’s file management program, such as Windows Explorer or File Explorer (not to be confused with the Internet Explorer Web browser). Many Internet-based photo sharing services exist that can handle these chores, as well as allowing you to easily share your photos with friends and family members over the Internet. The most popular services are Picasa (owned by Google), Flikr (owned by Yahoo), Shutterfly and Snapfish. For sharing videos over the Internet, many people also use Facebook, Youtube and Vimeo.
I suggest trying all of these programs and services and deciding which ones serve your needs best, but please, make sure your files are backed up, and then have fun with the rest.