Need help with saving digital photos. I got a digital camera for Christmas and planned eventually to save photos on CDs. As of now I have memory sticks in my camera that store over 100 photos and there is space on my hard drive to store more.
But eventually I would like to build up my photo collection and store them on CDs or something else.
I have purchased an external TDK CD burner that is extremely difficult to operate and I have been told that once I begin to burn a CD I cannot come back and add more data to it. (Maybe that would be so with a rewriteable CD, I don’t know)
Does anyone have experience storing data or photos to CD? any other digital photo storage that can be suggested to try?
I know nothing and am ready to return the CD Burner and plan for something else. But I don’t know what to use to store digital photos!!
Is it the burner hardware that’s tough to use or the software?
If it’s the software, there are tons of programs out there that can do what you want and are relatively easy to use. I’d investigate other software options because CDs are most likely how you want to store your photos.
In terms of being able to add more data to a non-rewritable CD, that’s sorta true. When you burn a disc, you create what’s called a session. When you are done, that session is closed. So lets say you copied 100 Mb of data onto a 650Mb CD, then 550 Mb would still be free. You could go back and create another session on that same disc, but typical CD drives will only see the latest session. The original session is still there, but you would need to use your burning software to switch sessions before you could retrieve it. But given that blank CD-R are so darn cheap, I’d just use a fresh disc.
I can’t speak for the long-term durability of CD-Rs, but given what’s out there, they are a good choice.
Burning your digital photos to a CD should be no different than burning any other computer data (text files, graphics, sounds) to a CD.
The notion that once you burn something on a CD and cannot add anything more to it means the burn is a “closed session” CD – IIRC, that is, the computer writes the directory information for your files, then writes your files, then writes another copy of the directory (for safety’s sake). Some CD-burning programs will also let you burn a multiple-session CD, where you can add more data to a CD at a later time.
In any event, given how cheap CD-R media is these days, I don’t think you need to worry too much about saving media by burning multi-session CDs.
As for the difficulty of using a CD-R drive, that is probably an issue either with the specific software you’re using to do the burning. Some programs make burning a CD as easy as dragging files into a window and clicking the “burn” button; if the TDK burner software intimidates you, consider getting something else.
But if you’re looking for easy to use software get Roxio Easy CD Creator. I’ts designed for people who DKS about CD burning. You might want to get a rewriter also, so you can add and subtract at will to your photo CDs.
See the CDR faq at http://www.cdrfaq.org/ to learn more about multisession, other software available and so on. Note section 3-9 on photos and CDs.
With Easy CD Creator it is trivial to “import” an earlier session, make changes, add new pics, etc. to a CDR until it fills up. Probably other software does the same. Notes: It’s write-once, you can’t recover the space used by a pic you don’t want anymore. 2. Each session incurs a small overhead so if you do several sessions on a disk you’ll have several megabytes of less space for pics. Multisession is helpful if you screwed up some pics and want to “delete”/substitute them (but they’re still on the disk, just not listed).
Note that Kodak has its PhotoCD format just for CDRs of pictures that is where the idea of multisession got a big boost. Stored in a special variable resolution format. Mainly used so you can take the CDR to a photo machine at the drug store to make your own prints and some film developers will sell you a CD of the film.
(Kodak is an interesting position. What do you do if your old core business, sell cheap, crappy cameras and make money on the development, if there is no development business anymore?)
Also keep in mind that not all CDRs are of the same quality. Some reports I’ve read on http://www.dcresource.com (an excellent site for all things DC related) call Kodak Gold Ultima the best. CDRs will degrade over time, and frankly no one knows how long they will keep data. Some of the cheap ones can show degredation (and loss of data) in a matter of months.
CDRs are cheap, but it pays to spend a little more and help ensure your data will last long term. I create new CD archives roughly once a year, with other burns during the year as I take more pictures. Storage in Jewel boxes seems to be the safest way.
Since you plan to save all of your digital images to a CDR, consider creating the digital images with your camera at the highest possible resolution, if possible. Of course, this means each individual image will be large, but since you plan to archive them to CDRs this shouldn’t make any difference.
OTOH, by creating the initial image at a high resolution, sometime in the future you will pat yourself on the back when you decide to take one of those images and make a photo paper copy, use it in a graphics design, maybe even take that image and blow it up into a poster.
You will eventually wish to crop the pictures. Several options are availible; I happen to use Paint Shop because it was on sale when I wanted something. Limited versions of such software often comes with a camera or scanner. I hated the limitations and just bought the darn thing.
Then the question of how to save the pictures. I copied what I saw being done by the Smithsonian. A full size TIFF copy and a JPG medium size. I don’t care for thumbnail size.
JPG has compresson, which is a mixed blessing. You can smoosh a picture a lot, but it won’t unsmoosh without loss. If you don’t pay attention, it compresses every time you save it. Thus the recommendation to save a non-compressed TIFF.
Ulead makes a program called DVD Picture Show that you might be interested in.
The program allows you to arrange your photos into slideshows which it burns to CD along with the original pictures. You then have the convenience of playing the disc in a DVD player (at video resolution) while preserving the original high-resolution images for printing and processing.
The achilles heel of digital photography is that there’s no easy way to fix the photos on paper. Inkjet printing is obscenely expensive, impractical for anything other than short runs, and far too delicate for archival purposes. But photofinishers now have the ability to create genuine photographic prints directly from digital media, a service which could be even more lucrative than their traditional line of business when kitschy impulse items like T-shirts, coffee mugs and mousepads are factored in.
They have a pretty cool service where you can upload your digital pictures to their server, and in about three days, you get beautiful prints in the mail. The prints are somewhat more expensive than standard film prints, but on the other hand, you need develop only the pictures you want, and you can mix and match print sizes. Also, you can just have them mail the prints to the grandparents.
The downside is that you need a high-speed Internet connection to upload the pictures in a reasonable time.
I use Nero 5.5.6, I just select to make a photocd, drag my photos to it (some sayyou can
do like 1,900 photos) & it makes a perfect cd.I do have to change the timing to 5 seconds display
per photo cause they set it to infinite. Absolutely beautiful looking pictures on the tv when I use
it on myApex dvd player. Then I can also copy them to vhs to mail to people.
I don’t think this is strictly true. You can buy an Epson Stylus Photo 820 Inkjet printer for $99 and make extremely good prints that are nearly indistinguishable from true prints, up to 8x10. They estimate that with the proper paper they will last 25-50 years, seems pretty archival to me.
Creating prints at home is pretty easy and cheap these days and the prints function pretty much like a true print. The dye-sub printers are even better, but for most consumers they won’t notice the difference.
In regard to Kodak and photofinishing: I was extrapolating from current trends to the future, when making actual paper prints will be far less in demand and much easier for the home user. I no longer have interest in getting paper prints myself. Maybe not as bad as Polaroid because of their other businesses, but it still must concern the boardroom people.
You taught me a lot! I didn’t realize that the CDs would lose quality over time for photos. Well I need to just focus on learning how to make them first!
I do understand about making the photos in the TIFF for quality. (I am still learning the camera too) All of this is a challenge.
For storing images on your camera, I always use highest quality JPG. In comparisons in PhotoShop, you’ll find that there are no or extremely few pixels that are different between the two and you’ll save around 75% of the space. For the JPG compression used in High Quality mode on most cameras today, you will see no effective loss of quality. I use that copy as my archive.
They don’t. Most manufacturers estimate a lifetime of a million read cycles for their CDR products. That’s more than 100 years of continuous playback.
The Epson 820, like most consumer-grade inkjet printers, uses a combined CMY (Cyan-Magenta-Yellow) cartridge for color reproduction. If you happen to run out of, say, yellow ink, you throw the entire cartridge away and insert a new one even if there was plenty of Cyan and Magenta ink left. This increases printing costs 200-300% over actual ink consumption, which at $15 per color cartridge can hardly be considered cheap.
Also, it doesn’t really matter if the paper you print on doesn’t yellow for 25 years if the ink that’s sprayed on it is ruined by a fingerprint, moisture drop or particulate contamination. Real photographic prints are far less susceptible to this sort of damage because the image is physically bonded to the paper (as opposed to spray-painted on top) and coated with a matte or glossy protective finish.
At $0.49 per 4x6 they’re probably less expensive than inkjet prints, too.
But don’t services like ofoto simply “spray-paint” your digital image onto photographic paper anyway? Or am I mistaken?
(I’ve had decent success with home-made prints from an inkjet onto glossy “photo paper.” In my experience, as long as you keep them out of direct sunlight for prolonged periods, they’ll hold up very well.)
