DIY Network

Media Management: Transfering, Storing and Organizing Digital Photos Get the most out of your digital photo collection with a good system for archiving and tracking your images. From "The Whole Picture" episode DTWP-208

	Good media management is the key to getting the most of your digital photo collection.

Is your digital photograph collection a mess? Professional photographer Erin Manning understands the frustration many people have when trying to find a specific photograph in their digital collection and teaches you how to get back in control.

In this Whole Picture lesson, Erin discusses media cards, demonstrating how to manage them and transfer images off of them properly. Next, she demonstrates different portable media storage devices that can store your photographs until you can get back to your computer.

Erin also discusses how to organize your digital photos on your computer so that they can easily be found, using tricks like metadata and key tagg to make searches a breeze.

Erin also recommends backing up and archiving your images on disc so that even if your computer dies, your precious photos will be preserved.

Materials:

digital camera
owner's manual
digital pictures
media cards
photo management software

advertisement

Archive your best images on disc, and store them in a safe location, to help ensure you'll always have your cherished photos.

Everything In It's (Digital) Place

When it comes to storing and cataloging your pictures, digital photography isn't all that different from film photography. You can either let all of your pictures pile up or you can take the time to organize them. While many of us may never take the time to organize our photos the way we should, digital photography makes it easier than ever to get organized and stay organized.

While organizing your digital pictures can easily make anyone feel overwhelmed, don't worry. Organizing your digital photographs doesn't have to be something you avoid. You just need to know a few things about what the pros call "media management."

Media Cards

The first thing you need to understand is how your camera stores images. Every digital camera has a media card, whether it's built-in or removable. Think of media cards like the film in traditional cameras. It 's simply the physical place where you store your images. There are various types of media cards for digital cameras--Compact Flash, Memory Stick, XD, SD, and others--but they all perform the same basic function: storing your images.

Memory cards tend to be small, and can be easily lost--along with all the pictures that are on them! Come up with a good system for storing and keeping track of them.

The most important consideration with media cards is capacity. Manufacturers are constantly coming out with higher capacity cards, but not everyone needs an 8 gigabyte card. Sure, on some models you can take 97 pictures on a 64 megabyte card, but that may be at only 1.8 megapixels, which is pretty low quality. At 5.0 megapixels, you can only fit roughly 39 pictures on a 64 megabyte card, so that card is going to fill up pretty quickly. Just keep in mind that the higher number of megapixels you're shooting at, the lower the number of pictures you'll be able to fit on a card and, as a result, the bigger card you'll want.

Media cards are incredibly reliable as most of them have no moving parts and can potentially last for hundreds of thousands of pictures, but do be careful with them. After all, they may be holding your cherished memories.

However, media cards are not intended to be a place to permanently store your photos. Here are some reasons why:

• They're small and can easily get lost or misplaced.
  
• They don't allow you to organize your images.
  
• Finally, there are just better ways out there to store your images that give you much greater control over them.

Page  1 | 2 | 3 | 4