In the old age, film / negatives were easy to be damaged and they had a determined life expectancy; sooner or later, time and oxidation of the silver in your negatives will kill them. On the digital age, a computer file can be transferred, copied and reproduced with great ease and time will not ever affect it. On the other hand, it sits on the imaginary world of computers and data bytes and it could just simply magically disappear. So we have to take some precautions to protect those images; it only takes a little bit of money and what is more important some consistency.
Today, for very little money, you can have a perfect professional quality photo lab in your home office. That is the real magic about digital photography; everything got a lot simpler. Some people say: “I miss the old times when you just take your roll of film to your photo lab and get prints”, well, you still can do the same with digital photography. You can get your memory chips printed onto photos and you can ask for a CD of your photos to take the place of the old film. You are still in the same predicament though, the life expectancy of a CD is greatly less than a negative.
In reality your only way to really preserve your family images is going back to grandma and grandpa’s old drawer full of dusty, yellowed photos… but in cyberspace.
This class will explain the basic steps you can take to create a cybernetic drawer of pictures that your grandchildren’s children will open one day and will speak sentences about our today like “look, the cars on this picture have tires on it” or “look how huge their cell phones are!”
Where do I put my images?
When you are doing digital photography the images you take are temporarily saved in reusable memory chips. As the price of those memory chips keep coming down and down, you could buy more memory chips and collect them the same way we used to do with negatives. Today nobody can warranty you that the memory chips will last 50 years, as there is not such a thing as a 50 year memory chip. They are too new and who knows how they react to time. I would not recommend doing that and it gets really expensive.
Your most common place to transfer your memory chips to is your home computer. I live in the Microsoft Windows World, but other operative systems operate very similarly. In Windows the most popular place to save your images is under My Documents / My Pictures; this is the default location to image type files to be saved… scary!!!!!!!!
One thing that most people do not know is that My Documents / My Pictures is a location inside your computer hard drive that is related to your user account. What happens if your user account gets corrupted? I am sure you are one of those lucky users whose computer never crashes and everything works exactly as Bill Gates planned, right? Well, if you are like me, and have experienced again and again really painful events working with your computer as the “Blue Screen of Death”, or “This program has experienced a fatal error please restart” or the sudden unplanned reboot of your computer or the sudden loss of power with subsequent major computer error and so on and so on, then you would understand that My Documents is not the right place for your children’s memories to be in. Your chances to lose your images outside My Documents are much smaller.
So where do I put them? Easy, create your own version of My Documents. If you have had some computer experience you know how to create folders, and subfolders inside your C: drive (your main computer hard drive). What I recommend is to create a folder inside C: called “SMITH IMAGES” for example. Inside you will create a folder structure by dates, for example: “2008-7-4-JULY4th FAMILY REUNION”, or “2007-12-31 NEW YEARS BASH”. Never use symbols like “%$&?/\!@#”, I will explain why later in the lesson. You can create a structure based on Location, Events, Subjects, but in my experience it is really hard to cover all the possibilities, usually by date and event covers all the bases. It will look something like this:
“SMITHS IMAGES” is the folder that will contain all my family pictures. “2007-11-20 THANKSGIVING AT MOMS” is the folder that contains the images of that event. Usually everything we photograph can be related to a specific date.
One thing you have to have in mind is the size of your C: drive. Never fill your hard drive where you almost run out of space, you can crash your windows session bad. Always have at least 5GB of empty space in you C: drive. When you order a new computer you can order a second internal hard drive (highly recommended) or you can keep all your images in an external hard drive (not recommended if you do not have second external hard drive that replicates it). The size of hard drive you need will depend on how many pictures you like to take. On my last trip to Africa I took 9,462 pictures in 3 weeks, on my last trip to Yosemite about 2,000 pictures. All images I have taken since I bought my first digital camera I can hold them on 150GB but overall I have 3.5 TB of available space just in case, I have all that space for less than $1,000, you do the math.
How do I transfer my images to my images folder?
There are different ways to do this. Some people like me like to buy a memory card reader and manually move images over. Other people like to plug their camera to the computer and let the camera software move the images. I do not recommend saving images on the location that the camera software chooses; what happens if your camera dies and you change camera brand? You will have a heck of a time finding the images in your hard drive; it is a similar scenario as the My Documents / My Pictures folder.
For me the easiest way to transfer images from your camera to your images folder is using a memory card reader or using your camera but find the images through windows explorer.
In theory (I know, you hate when an IT guy starts a sentence with these two words), when you plug your memory card reader or your camera to your computer, two things should happen. One, a drive letter will show up in your Windows Explorer or My Computer:
Second a pop up window like the one below will come up in your screen:
At this time you have direct access to the images you took: 
Or, select Open folder to view files using Windows Explorer option and click OK, which takes you to the same screen as above. 
Now you have access to the images in the memory card. The next step is to create the folder inside your images folder. Open My Computer, open your folder (“SMITHS IMAGES”) and create a new folder and name it with the year first, then month, then day plus the subject of the event (“2007-11-20 THANKSGIVING AT MOMS”) Once you have this folder available it is as simple as copy and paste or click and drag.
Why naming the folders YEAR – MONTH – DAY – SUBJECT? When you are working on Windows Explorer or also known as My Computer you have the ability to sort the folders and files by alphabetical order. By naming the folders this way you can accomplish having a chronological list of events, that’s why.
The scary thought of a unique copy
I watched an interview of the famous casino entrepreneur Steve Wynn a couple of weeks ago. The multibillionaire was showing the journalist all his collection of art around his hotel. Then he pointed to a Picasso that was hanging in his office. This painting was worth more than ten million dollars. Then with a smile on his face he proceeded to tell the camera how awhile back he tripped over a chair because of his very weak vision and put his hand right through the painting. I don’t think any of us would think of that event as something lo laugh about, but think about this: If Steve Wynn could have made a copy of the original Picasso and saved it somewhere else and for some reason would hold 100% of its value, would he have done that? We pay a lot of money in this world for items that are unique, and we do that because there is really no known way to duplicate them. Well, in the case of our digital photographs we can create exact reproductions as many times as we want for no cost and not doing it would be like Mr. Wynn breaking my compadre’s painting.
When I am traveling with my camera I religiously copy my camera chips into portable external hard drives, IPod, laptop, friends’ home computers, burn CDs, DVDs or anything I come across, but never would leave one picture sitting in my memory card as the only copy in existence for a long time. I do not think you need to take it as extreme as I do but, you should see how dangerous it is to keep any digital images in your memory chips for a long time.
Now, all your images are sitting in your images folder inside your home computer. The next step is reduce the amount of time those images are the only copy in existence.
There a couple of steps you can take to help:
- Have at least 4 memory chips always available
I own at least six 2 GB memory chips. I have labeled each one of them from A to F. When I go on a long trip I always start with A, once the chip is full I move to B and so on and so on. I always leave the images in the memory chip until I am reusing them even when I already transferred them to my home computer. Sometimes it might be month before I have to reuse a chip. This way I have another safety temporary layer just in case. For example: I go to one of my grandkids soccer game, in my camera I have memory chip D. The first thing I do before I start taking pictures (this is critical) I format the memory card or what is the same I delete all images inside. When it is full I move to E and do the same. That night I transfer the images from D and E to my computer and I put F in my camera but I do not delete the content of D and E until right before I need to reuse them. So for awhile I have an extra copy sitting in my camera bag of my last few events.
- Have a second hard drive connected to your home computer and have a daily backup routine installed
Nowadays you can buy a two terabytes external hard drive for less than $250 ( by when you read this, that price would have already come down ), that equates to two million megabytes, with a standard image about two megabytes each, you are talking about two million images in a $250 external hard drive. Mind boggling! For another $30 you can purchase a program called Second Copy (http://www.secondcopy.com/). This easy to use program can transfer every night all your images from your C: drive to your external hard drive automatically. You can follow a simple wizard and set it up in less than 5 minutes.
- Order your hard copies online
Kodakgallery.com, Mpix.com, and many other websites make real good quality prints from your digital images and mail them directly home, saving you a trip to your local photo lab. Anytime you upload the images to their website photo galleries is another place where a digital copy of your image resides for awhile. There are other websites like http://www.zenfolio.com/ where you can upload all your images, purchase prints from, even sell prints from, that will hold all your images at full resolution but it will cost you about $100 per year to have (check my website at Zenfolio http://www.qwcphoto.com/)
- Share your pictures with friends and family
Make copies for your friends and family so they have them in their computers. It could come handy one day.
- When getting prints order a CD
As we mentioned before you can always order a CD with all the images inside. Most of the photo labs will offer that for a few dollars. Just remember, computer CDs is not a format that will last forever.
All the options above are helpful but none of those by themselves are good enough. You really need a system in place that gives you almost 100% guarantee that your grandchildren will see how their grandpa looks with hair on his head. The next chapter will describe a combination of the choices above that in my opinion and my experience will give you peace of mind about the future of your images.
Our Mission: “Save the Memories”
The steps I propose in this chapter are a combination of solutions you need to put in place. These steps require some babysitting; they will not work just by themselves. With a little bit of consistency you can achieve the results we are looking for. It will also require a little bit of investment.
Shopping List:
- Three extra memory chips (2GB memory chips about $15 each) to follow the routine explained on page …
- USB External hard drive (300 GB to 2 TB depending of the volume of pictures you take on a weekly basis, between $100 and $300)
- License of Second Copy (http://www.secondcopy.com/ $30)
Our goals:
- Future generations to be able to see all our pictures
- Most of our digital images will survive a disaster like fire, theft, flooding, power surge, major computer malfunction, etc
- I will not have to spend hours and hours making this happen once it is in place.
Step 1 - Organizing our digital world
As mentioned on “Where do I put my images?” you must have a good organized system before you can accomplish any of our goals. You have to create your own routine to move your images from your camera to your home computer after each event. I promise you, once you do it a few times it takes very little time.
Organize your images as described on page … You might require a little help finding the original location of the images if you already downloaded them from your camera. 99% of the time they will be sitting somewhere inside My Documents and probably inside My Pictures. One piece of advise, do not cut and paste the images from their original location to the new location, do a copy and paste and once you are done copying go back and delete them, just in case.
Before you do anything make sure you have plenty of space in your computer hard drive. How do I know? Open My Computer and check the Total Size, Free Space columns for your C drive or the drive you are planning to use. Make sure you have plenty of space. If you are already running out of space you need to think about adding another internal or external hard drive.
The image above shows “My Computer”. If you look at the size of my C Drive , 74.4 GB and the Free Space 2.94 GB, that is not even close enough space to save all my pictures there (highlighted in the image below)
In stead look at Drive D, I have a total size of 279 GB and of those 268 GB are free, a much better choice.
In your case you will probably have plenty of space in your C: so we will continue as if that is the case.
Next step, create your folder structure. It should look something like this:
Create the folders before you start transferring your images. If you had a lot of digital pictures from years past… then yes, it is going to take some time. It will be worth it; hopefully if you stay consistent it will be the last time you go through this process.
At this time, after a little bit of time bringing your existing pictures to our new order, we have a good organized system for the future of our memories. Right now, you should be able to grab all your images by selecting one unique folder called “SMITH IMAGES” or “SMITH PHOTOS” or something similar inside your hard drive. This is the folder we are going to protect and copy to different locations to insure its unlimited life expectancy.
From now on, after each family event, each kids sport event, each family trip, what are you going to do? Right! You are going to move those images to the correspondent folder in your hard drive following the instructions from chapter 1
Step 2 - Avoiding the nightmare of the unique copy
The next step will take advantage of the greatest feature digital photography has given us: being able to make multiple copies without losing any quality. To do this you will need an external hard drive and software to transfer your images. Why external hard drive? You could need to be able to transport that hard drive easily to avoid catastrophic event like fire, flood or even tornados (External also means portable).
The brand and size of the external hard drive is really up to you. I use Maxtor, Western Digital, it really does not matter much. The size, I would recommend to have at least double the size of hard drive than the space held by your images today. Honestly for an extra hundred dollars you can have enough space for decades instead of years. I recommend USB connection for the ease of being able to plug to all types of computers.
Once you have your external drive connected and installed in your computer, it will show as a drive letter, both in My Computer and Windows Explorer.
The other side of the coin of the digital era and computers in general.
“In late July of 2009 I was told by some neighbors about a series of break-ins in our neighborhood. I guess with the tough economy and the rise of unemployment certain people were growing desperate. Where I live is mostly quiet retired nice old folks, so they make an easy target for these undesirable individuals. Because of that, I decided to buy an extra external hard drive and put a copy of every single image I own in it to take to my work office, in case somebody breaks-in and steals my computer and all my other external hard drives. As I am trying to explain to
you in this chapter, I connected my new hard drive to my computer, the system gave it letter “J:” After that, I created a routine on Second Copy to copy everything from my drive “F:” containing all my images, to “J:”, scheduled to run that night around 10 pm. As a precaution I also have a routing that copies everything from “F:” to “H:”, a second external hard drive (F – containing all my images – to J – blank hard drive, F – containing all images – to H – backup hard drive). Next morning I go to my computer planning on working on some of the images from my last trip to Yosemite. My whole body went numb when all my hard drives showed empty (F, H and J). The first thing it went through my head was, “Carlos, take a deep breath, you are just not thinking straight, keep looking”. After ten minutes
of absolute panic, I came to the conclusion that indeed I have lost ten years of digital photography for a reason I could just not understand. I came upstairs to my wife shaking and told her about the great news. She could not believe that I could have let something like that happen to me. She was right; I remembered that fortunately I had taken a copy of all my images to work in January. So worst case scenario, I lost seven months of work; OK, I can live with that. After a cold glass of water and few more deep breaths I came back to my computer and started to analyze what in the world happened. Pay attention to what I am going to explain, as it could happen to you. When I left my computer right after I installed my new
hard drive, the system had assigned drive letters automatically. I left with the certainty that those drive letters would stay that way for at least that night. Until that day I have never experienced a sudden change on drive letters before. That same night, following recommendations from Mr. Microsoft, I have automatic updates running in my computer, (a group of updates that automatically get installed in my computer to protect against hackers, viruses or error on windows overall). Well, the night prior to the fatal event there was an update that required a reboot of the computer, so as Mr. Gates recommended, I let the system reboot by itself (all this is occurring automatically without my knowledge). What I did not plan for is that after that reboot, my system decided to randomly change the drive
letters in two of my external hard drives, trading F to J. Consequently, my Second Copy routine did as follow: F – now an empty hard drive – to I –my old hard drive containing all my images. I had it set up to match exactly the folder on F to my folder in I, consequently it match F to I by deleting all images in my I drive. Same thing on my routing from F to H. Do you follow? I made two critical mistakes: one, I set up my second copy routine to synchronize folders instead of copying from one folder to the other; two, I set up the routines to copy whole drive letters instead of
specific folders to specific folders. It is very uncommon for drive letters to change that way but obviously it can happen and sooner or later it will happen to you. “
You are seeing your drive letter in your computer, if you do not have any other memory external devices connected, the most common letter assigned will be F: (C: is usually your internal computer hard drive holding your operative system, D: is any extra internal hard drive you may have, E: is usually your CD or DVD drive) but it could really be any letter, G:, H:, I: etc. To avoid the same incident I suffered we are going to create a folder inside your new external hard drive called: “F – C SMITH IMAGES”, this folder will hold the copy of your images folder from C:
The next step involves a little basic computer knowledge. We need to install Second Copy. If you want to save $30 you can use a different type of software that might have come free with your external hard drive. It is completely up to you. I like Second Copy because of its simplicity and very small foot print in your computer. Most the steps I am going to explain with second copy you can do with other software. Use the always helpful “Help” section of the software if you need to.
Go to
Let’s recap: you have all your images organized inside a folder called something like “SMITH IMAGES”, you have an external hard drive you can find in My Computer under a drive letter like F: and you have created a folder inside F: named something like “F – C SMITH IMAGES”, you have installed Second Copy or a similar back up / copy software solution. We are only one step from having a good system in place.
Creating a new backup profile or routine
Usually backup software will have a wizard that can walk you through what you want to accomplish. What you want to do is a simple copy from “C: SMITHS IMAGES” to “F: F – C SMITH IMAGES”, specifying both folders. I will show you step by step how to do this with second copy.
Start Second Copy.
Start a new profile
Select Custom Set up, click next
Source image is our C: SMITH IMAGES. Type the path or click Browse and point to the folder. Click Next
Select All files and folders, click Next
Destination folder is the folder we created inside the F: drive called F – C SMITH IMAGES, click next
Frequency of the backup is completely up to you and also depends whether you leave your computer running all the time or if you shut it down every night. I leave my computer running all the time and I set up my monitors to shut down after 10 minutes to save energy. Because I have so many routines going all the time I leave the computer running through the night. Second Copy runs in the background and it does not affect too much the performance of your computer. You will have to figure out when it is the best time for second copy to run. You computer has to be running in order for the routine to work. I set it up once per day at night. You can set up the option Also run at Startup so if your computer was shut down it will automatically run when you start, good choice for laptop users.
The next section is the tricky one, what type of back up you want.
I recommend Simple Copy. With this option anything you delete from C SMITH IMAGES will not be deleted from F: F – C SMITH IMAGES. If I had used this choice before my dramatic summer event I would not have lost anything. With this choice any added or changed files will be copied to F and anything you have deleted from C that you already backed up to F will not be deleted from F.
Click next. Name your Profile so clearly it identifies what it is doing.
You are done. It was not that bad, was it?
Right now you have a system in place that protects you from the following:
- Your computer dying and consequently losing all your digital images
o A copy is sitting in your external hard drive. You can recover the content to any computer.
- You or somebody in your home mistakenly deleting all your digital images
o Copy it back from your external hard drive
- Your windows software going bye-bye and not being able to access your internal hard drive
o Rebuild your computer then copy the files back from your external hard drive
- Your computer getting a virus and getting corrupted by it
o Rebuild your computer then copy the files back from your external hard drive
What you are still not protected from:
- Catastrophic events like flooding, tornado, fire
o You computer and external hard drive damaged
- Robbery
o They take your computer and your external hard drive
You have gained peace of mind from the unique copy nightmare, now we are going to take care of the unique location nightmare
Step 3 – Get the heck out of here!
The final step will give us the final safety layer. After this you should be able to sleep well knowing that something really catastrophic has to occur as an earthquake, Russian invasion, nuclear holocaust or alien hostile take over, in any particular order, for you to lose your images.
Get it out of here! Get it far away from your home computer. There are multiple choices on this step. It all depends on how much money you want to spend, who do you know, where do you work or where do you live.
Choice 1 – Use an online service to keep copies of your SMITH IMAGES folder in a server somewhere in China probably. Companies like Symantec/Norton offer additional services to their antivirus software that will backup a folder into cyberspace for a yearly fee. You will need high-speed internet, forget doing it through the phone line or even a wireless card. Read appendix … for more information on this services.
Choice 2 – Purchase a second hard drive and take it to your office or family member house or safety deposit bank. What saved my day after the automatic renaming of drives letters event was the fact that I took a copy of all my images to my office at the beginning of the year. It is as simple as using second copy once per month or once per quarter to make a duplicate from C to an extra external hard drive and take it somewhere away from your home. Best place, a safety deposit bank if you already have one set up. You might think it is over done, just think about how much money you would be willing to spend to recover all your kids pictures if you were to lose them. You could take it to your lake house or to grandpa and grandma’s home; you usually go there at least once every quarter. Anywhere outside your home will work (not the neighbor, if you get hit by a tornado or flooding he probably does too)
Choice 3 - Ask the geek near door for a favor. You probably know a guy like me that has way too much computer equipment at their home. This person, like me, probably has a problem buying way too much memory space and, like me, he can probably fit all your family pictures in his or her hard drives. Take your F: external hard drive to his house, copy it into his computer memory space while you have a couple of beers or watch a football game (soccer in my case) and you are done.
There are many other options; the key is to make sure you have an extra copy somewhere else. Today an external hard drive of 250GB is almost the same size as a deck of cards, it does not need a power supply and it cost less than $100. When you see the risk of not having this extra step it makes complete sense to make it happen.
By now you have a good understanding of the steps you need to take to protect one of the most valuable things we own, our memories. This whole process can be used to protect any valuable digital information: music, videos, personal finances, email correspondence, word documents, etc. Just remember Steve Wynn’s incident, we have the ability to duplicate very valuable items for us, he can’t do that with his Picasso without going from a value of ten million to a couple hundred for a copy. Take advantage of the benefits of the digital era; just be careful how you go about it. I hope this class was helpful. If you have any questions or you are interested on the wonder of fine art photography visit me at http://www.qwcphoto.com/
Thank you.
Carlos Quesada
Quesada World Collection
