Pros & cons of digital photos

[shootingstar]

At this very moment, I'm in stuck mode. Went to a pharmacy where you order and have printed off in minutes hard copy photos from digital images. I biked over with photos burned to disc.

But person won't be there at photo counter to do photo jobs until 4 hrs. due to illness. The thing is that I need some particular photos to paint from...and current photos at home don't inspire me the same. My Muse is stuck but charging to go... :mad:

We take and have thousands of digital photos. While it is great...for compact storage...just ploughing through tons of file directories and many photos to find good ones...takes considerable time.

Are you very organized about your digital photos? What % of your digital photos do you make prints/print off?

[mimitabby]

we take tons of digital photos too, but don't need hard copies of most of them. We view them and enjoy them on our computers.

Digitals aren't any less practical than What they replaced, really.

I can never go back. And I just read that Polaroid will no longer make Polaroid film. It is the end of an era. Polaroid
was the former "instant" photo.

[Zen]

I like to think I'm fairly organized with my photographs.
I have them organized like this (kind of like 'tagging")
my Documents>photographs>sub-folders tagged with event or subject name>individual photo name

Wow, I just impressed myself!

I get about .oooo9% of my shots printed.

I would like to get my old film camera fixed, I miss the control I have over depth of field, light, and color saturation with different films.

As for Polaroid, it has a unique color quality. I bet there are a few fine artists searching for all the Polaroid film they can stockpile. Kind of like Elaine and The Sponge.

[SouthernBelle]

Can you not print them out yourself? If you have a color inkjet printer and some photoprint paper, you can produce some pretty decent prints.

When you print you have to tell it what kind of paper you're using and that you want it to print photo quality.

Bit of an ink hog, but I usually print my own.

[Zen]

too cheap/poor to print them myself :o

[shootingstar]

I like to think I'm fairly organized with my photographs.
I have them organized like this (kind of like 'tagging")
my Documents>photographs>sub-folders tagged with event or subject name>individual photo name

Wow, I just impressed

I get about .oooo9% of my shots printed.

I would like to get my old film camera fixed, I miss the control I have over depth of field, light, and color saturation with different films


Related: I am highly selective in what I print in colour at home. ie. execute a print colour job..um every 3-4 months. We just bought a laser printer so the dried up cartridge problem is not an issue right now.

I prefer to spend 25 cents at the pharmacy to print off a good photo on quality paper..if I plan to give photo to a family member or friend.

Wow, I could only rename inidividual digital photos...maybe 10 out of 100 photos.

Cycling really encourages one to see the world visually way more and to see more detail ... along the way.

[Grog]

I print a batch after each major trip or event. The photos get filed away in an album that's not really organized. On my hard drive they are organized by directory and some of them are tagged, but not many. I find that the free Google software Picasa (available for download somewhere on the Google site) is just great to organize things and find them later.

I have discovered photobooks recently. We did our wedding pictures and everyone thought the results were spectacular. I am the most critical of it: the quality is certainly not that of a professional album, but friends and family members just LOVED it and all of them told me I was silly. Nonetheless, it's a different category. We used http://www.mypublisher.com/ and did hard cover (parents) and softcover (people who helped us the most) albums. We also did one of our honeymoon photos just for fun in a softcover book. It's a great way to show pictures, much more fun than a regular album, I find. Probably more similar to a scrapbook, but there's no way you'll catch me playing with scissors and glue, I'm too clumsy and impatient. I'd rather play with my computer, their software is super easy and if you have skills you can also do photoshop work. (Some people do digital scrapbooking, too, you could research that option...) Anyway have a look if you're curious: http://www.mypublisher.com/bookstore/book_viewer.py?d=tq%3Ey-cppl%60je%3E3124384 (long download). What makes me feel better is that if we loose it or want another copy, I just have to send the files out again. (There are bike photos around the end of the book...)

[Geonz]

I can't even find my flogging camera.

The software that came with it files things in a folder when I put 'em on the 'puter. That's more organized than I ever am :D

[Tuckervill]

Picasa from Google does all my photos any way I want them, as long as I give them a searchable name when I import them. I LOVE Picasa.

Karen

[Zen]

I use Picasa but I maintain my system in my files in order to use Photoshop.

[Crankin]

Ah, we print all of our pictures. We wait up until we have a reasonable amount and then use Kodak Gallery to do it.
I would not enjoy sitting at my computer, looking at pictures. I do sometime, but I would much rather look through my albums, which by the way, are not organized at all. But, I know what pictures from what year are in all of my albums. It's like it's in my head. Since digital photos are fairly new, the pictures that I love looking at the most wouldn't be on line anyway.
Again, count me in as an old fashioned person.

[tulip]

I print some of my digital photos in order to frame them. I have alot of framed photos of trips and family. I don't display all of them at a time, but change them out to keep things interesting.

If I'm in a hurry, I print them out at Kinkos at the Sony Photo station. If I'm not in a hurry, I get them printed by Snapfish online and sent to me.

[OakLeaf]

DH is a semi-pro photographer, I just take occasional snapshots. So my needs are very different from his, but I've been able to learn a few things:

(1) Backup, backup, backup. Just like your other important digital records, make more than one copy, make at least one of them an optical copy (DVD), and store them in different places. It's not a bad idea to use a bank safe deposit box - they're climate controlled, fireproof and pretty inexpensive. Check your archives periodically to ensure their integrity, and if one becomes damaged or corrupted, make a new one from your magnetic storage. Remember that film prints and negatives don't last all that long, either, when they're just left in their envelopes in a box in a closet.

(2) Sorting through hundreds of envelopes of thousands of prints isn't quick, either. A basic indexing application like iPhoto is a huge help, but the easiest thing to do for snapshots is to tag your favorite pictures the first time you look at them. Then it hardly takes any extra time at all. Make separate folders (pets, family, 2008 vacation, whatever) and either use an indexing program or make actual copies of your favorite images. You can re-name each image with more specifics.

(3) Make sure you keep an unedited copy of your images. Each time you crop, re-size or otherwise edit, the software will run a compression algorithm and slightly degrade the quality of your image.

[mimitabby]

(2) Sorting through hundreds of envelopes of thousands of prints isn't quick, either. A basic indexing application like iPhoto is a huge help, but the easiest thing to do for snapshots is to tag your favorite pictures the first time you look at them. Then it hardly takes any extra time at all. Make separate folders (pets, family, 2008 vacation, whatever) and either use an indexing program or make actual copies of your favorite images. You can re-name each image with more specifics.
.

yes. I have some photos that have been "lost" for 20 years. They're in some envelope some where in one of my boxes of photos. The ones that are in Albums do better.

I was going to suggest Shutterfly.com or something like them to print your photos. They are really fast and inexpensive.

[lph]

We used to take slides only, and would spend aaaaaages getting them printed, mounted, sorted, re-sorted and so on. Ever since we went digital we've never looked back. I'm a bit of a dragon when it comes to deleting stuff, I hate wading through a gazillion mediocre shots to find the one I want, so I'm in charge of thinning the crop immediately after downloading to the computer, and I'll often go back and thin some more later. Dh would rather just save everything. We don't print anything. Almost. Once in a blue moon I'll have a shot I want a paper copy of, otherwise I love the ease of distributing pics digitally. We never even look at slides anymore. If I were a better photographer I might mourn the loss of quality, but I'm not so I'm very happy just being able to show everybody my photos immediately after the event.

We sort them in folders like this: Pictures/year/month and event/consecutive numbering, as in Pictures/2008/02 Ride to work/5. That way they sort themselves neatly the way I remember them.

[Jen-Jen]

I take tons of pictures and sometimes I go back into them and I see how many of them are similiar and I get rid of them. Only problem is that I don't always back them up on disc and I tend to have fatal errors on my computer once and a while...I lose everything.

So...after losing the last great crop of pics I now back them up and label it all. Birthdays and Holidays on one disc together. Friend parties and rides (which in my opinion is a great big party) on another.

I do the same thing as other and they get labeled as Christmas Quinlan 2008 and I know that those pics are my side of the family this year.

I hate it when I lose pictures!

[Zen]

We used to take slides only, and would spend aaaaaages getting them printed, mounted, sorted, re-sorted and so on. Ever since we went digital we've never looked back.

I miss not being able to shoot Kodachrome.
I gotta bet my film camera fixed.

What about backing up photo files on a flash drive?
i don't think cd's last forever either, though they'll probably outlast me.

[shootingstar]

(3) Make sure you keep an unedited copy of your images. Each time you crop, re-size or otherwise edit, the software will run a compression algorithm and slightly degrade the quality of your image.

Yes, very important. I learned this the hard way on some photos taken 15 yrs. ago which were digitally scanned..some resolution degraded.

On Zcentury's remark...: I also miss the degree of control for depth, etc. on single reflex lens cameras vs. the digital. I had a Nikon for years which served me well which I added on a bounce flash then a zoom-wide angle lens.

While the "cheapie" digital light small cameras are so convenient ..for recording things that you see..to take serious quality shots....well, NOT looking through the aperture (because of the structural design of cheaper digital cameras) and holding the camera 3 ft. away from your face...does not guarantee proper focus on the right things..