I was talking to a guy who sells reprints of old photos made from old negatives. though not all his pics were car related, there was enough to where he was selling at the Turlock swap meet. this got me to thinking... where are all the old pictures from nowadays going to come from in the future?? there is no negative to put in a box and forget about... and I'm guessing far fewer get printed and put in Photo albums these days than in the past. all my car show pics get put on a CD soon after, so hopefully when we are all dead and gone there will be some HOT ROD history for the next generation to look at and think how cool it was in 2008. what do you do with yours?
I have a 500 gig external hard drive as a backup and a 300 gig external as my main drive. I use iPhoto to organize all my photos into folders by type, year, subject, etc... IF (probably a BIG if) my hard drives last 100 years then maybe someone will get to see what's on them...probably won't even last 10 years would be my guess. BTW: CD's and DVD's don't have an indefinite shelf life. From what I hear a CD or DVD lasting longer than 10 years is highly unlikely...they delaminate and become unreadable. I did read that they are using more stable DVD and CD media, but not sure if that is more in the form of blue-ray technology,...which is much more expensive.
I just took the card from my camera in to WalMart and they can do 1 Hour prints. I got 200 done. Cheap like borscht. Now I have an album.
no ****... I lost thousands of pictures when my hard drive crashed. I had 70,000 pictures saved in my 'Cars' folders. *really... 70,000+ photos that I grabbed online I had most of the pictures I took the last 2 years on it as well... probably lost another 5-6k photos... all of those hi rez... I have an external hard drive at home... and a stack of photo CDs about 3 foot high in the closet. (on a side note... I had 255 photos printed by walgreens yesterday. My fiancee' took files off of the computer at home and uploaded them to Walgreens and they printed them out 50 miles away and I picked them up at lunch while I was at work. With a coupon it worked out to 11 cents a print. All 4X6)
I have "backups" of them in several different places: * RAW and/or JPEGs on the internal HDD of my Home PC * RAW and/or JPEGs on a 1TB external HDD * RAW and/or JPEGs on CD-R or DVD-R media * Low Rez copies on Internet sites (PhotoBucket.com, SnapFish, the HAMB, etc.) ... and most of them still exist on one of my digital camera SD or CF memory cards. Like Buzznut mentioned, CD's & DVD's don't have an indefinite shelf life ... in fact, unlike photographs, negatives, & chromes (slides) that slowly deteriorate over time, images burned to CD & DVD media will just "stop working" (no longer readable) one day ... Depending on the type of media and several other factors (light, temperature, scratches, etc.) this "one day" might be in 2 years ... maybe 5 or 10 ... some manufacturers claim 20, 50, or even 100 years! IMHO ... You should maintain multiple backups ... on different types of media ... in different locations ... and migrate your image archives to newer storage technologies (Blu-ray, HD-DVD, Solid State HDDs, Holographic discs, etc.) when they become readily available at a reasonable cost. NOTE to 49ratfink: I'll be more than happy to "babysit" one copy of each of your Picture CDs ... and I won't even charge you!
I thought I was the only one saving lots of pics. I'm up to about 50-60,000. I also just lost some due to a hard drive crash. I just did my first photo dvd. How do I watch it on my TV with my DVD player. I get a "can't read" message when I try. What is iPhoto? TIA
you mean I'm going to have to print all these freakin pictures and put them in photo albums? I thought I was done with photo albums. that ****s.
........and just so you know if you write on a cd with a reguar sharpie it decreases its shelf life also
I'd think that for the price, and the longevity, an external hard drive is probably a good cost-effective way to archive your photos. Just don't leave the drive plugged in when you're not using it to prolong its life and maybe keep it from getting infected. And if the contents are really valuable I'd store them in a fire resistant safe-box or somewhere away from your home, like a safe deposit box. Multiple copies in multiple locations would be the safest. CDs and DVDs are cheap and easy to work with, but as mentioned above you have to get into the habit of storing them properly and re-copying them every few years. The way prices are dropping, I'm surprised that more people just don't stock up on 1gb or larger memory cards, fill 'em up with photos one time, stash 'em away safely and load up a new card. Flash memory is pretty stable if it's not constantly erased and rewritten and a lot cheaper and easier to handle than film. Of course it's cheaper still to keep reusing the cards.
Funny you ask. I was just discussing this with my wife. We are about to go through all mine and start getting high quality prints made of the better stuff. I want my kids to have a bunch of **** to sort through when I die. Serves 'em right after making me clean up after them all this time. For any of you that have had drives or PCs fail, it is extremely likely that you can still recover you data. In the event of a PC failure, you can pull the drive and conect it to another PC as a secondary on the main bus or use an inexpensive USB enclosure to turn it into an external drive. In the event that the drive died, there are firms that will remout your platters and copy the data to good media for a reasonable price. They can usually recover drives that have been wet, burned, sometimes even with physical damage. Google it.
I use a photo site, specifically fotki.com membership is by the year.. but I have some 20,000 photos (obviously not all car stuff) on my site at www.fotki.com/sawzallshop.. additionally.. with p***words and the like I can share with family and friends all over the world.. I see no need to print any images anymore..
If your HD dies and you're Googling around for suggestions you'll probably see some info about putting the failed drive in the freezer to bring it back to life, at least temporarily. It sounds flakey and I don't imagine it works all the time but it is at least worth a try. I got an old HD in a baggie in the back of my freezer as we speak. I haven't tried transferring anything off it for a while but at least initially I was able to salvage some files off it. Leave it in the freezer for a couple days if you can, maybe wrap it up in one of those flexible gel ice pack things and a towel or something to insulate it and keep it cold as long as possible. I had the best luck by transferring maybe 20 or 30 files at a time. It would warm up a bit, frazz out, and then back in the freezer it went for a couple days. You could plug it in as a slave drive in your PC but you'll need to make sure you change the jumper setting on your main drive before hand (if it only has a single HD) so it knows to look for the new drive. And you'll have to plug the iced drive in with the computer off and then boot things up and this all takes some extra time to do while your old drive is starting to thaw out. Probably the simplest way to try this is to get an external USB drive enclosure, install the failed HD in it and freeze the whole mess that way. Then you can grab it out of the freezer and hot plug it into your desktop or laptops USB port already booted up and ready to go. And by the way, if you don't know how to do this kind of stuff with computers, you didn't hear any of this from me. You're on your own now!
i burn all of mine to disk (cd rom). i think the most i've actually done with them is post them into an on line photo album to share with other people. i use photobucket most of the time, but i can also take pics from my other website (motortopia.com) to post on other sites. the problem is that i can't get into photobucket from work, but i can get to the motortopia site.
This is important info... I'm printing it so not to loose it (HaHa).Opened my eyes to many things. Gona impliment offensive tactics immediatly.
S**** books! Nothing more fun than looking at them while sitting around the shop and drinking soda pop...
Sounds stupid, but a friend of mine recently had her hard drive crash - thought she lost all her families pics.... Turns out she had uploaded all of them (at least a thousand) to myspace about a month before the hard drive crashed - every pic was still there. BTW iPhoto is a Mac application (pretty nice) for managing the pictures on your drive.
THat would be a good thing about a lap top. You could leave the hard drive in the freezer with just a cord coming out plugged into to computer. Wouldn't have to worry about it warning back up then.
The external hard drive has been the best solution for me. This way I can take my time to edit the pictures down to eventually print them or burn the best to disk and also save them to the drive. With the new 8-10 meg cameras saving all the pictures to cd/dvd would too time consuming when you can easily shoot 2-4 gigs of pictures/video at a big show.
The Jalopy Journal
