One of the biggest benefits of digital photography is that you can take as many pictures as you want at virtually no cost - with no developing and printing or film to pay for there's nothing to stop you shooting away to your heart's content.
And today's personal computers come with such huge hard drives that it'll still take years until you fill them up with your digital photos. But there is a downside to keeping all your irreplaceable photos and memories on your computer's hard drive; what happens if (or some would say when) it goes wrong, or is lost through accident or theft? You're left with nothing - especially if, like most people, you print only a small proportion of your photos. With this in mind, here are a few tips on making sure your precious JPEGs are as safe as they can possibly be.
Backing up
By far the best course of action is to back up all your digital photos. Virtually all modern PCs can burn CDs, and you'll be able to fit from around 100 to over a thousand images (depending on resolution) on a single disk costing under 50p. If you really value your photos I would recommend making two copies of each CD you write, and storing one of the copies somewhere safe - or at least somewhere separate from the computer itself.
In an ideal world you'd have one set of CDs at home and one at work, but of course this might not be possible. If you take a lot of high resolution photos you might want to consider using DVD%2B/-R as an alternative to CD%2B/-R (DVDs hold around seven times more data than CDs). If you need access to your images regularly, you might consider a large external hard drive (with a FireWire or USB 2.0 connection) to store them on (in addition to the CD or DVD backup) - that way if the computer fails you'll still have access to your images.
Other backup options
If you don't shoot a huge amount of images you can back copies of your images using an online photo sharing site, such as fotki., which offers free uploading for modest collections or unlimited web storage for a small annual fee. Such sites also have the advantage that you can access your images from any computer with web access, anywhere in the world, and many also offer mail order printing of your pictures. Of course storing your images online is only really practical if you've got fast internet access in the first place so broadband is a distinct advantage. It's also worth checking with your ISP to see if they offer a similar free service.
The file format of every image file has a suffix in order to show what type of file format the file is - like this:
In digital photography, however, the files used are normally in jpg, tiff or raw format. Unless you have altered your camera settings, your camera will save your images as jpg (or jpeg), pronounced jaypeg.
JPEG files also have the advantage that they can be opened and read by virtually all popular software packages. But by far the most important thing about JPEG is that it allows photos to be 'compressed' - squashed down so that they occupy much less space on your memory card or computer hard drive.
A typical 3 megapixel digital photo contains around 9 Megabytes' worth of information. So if you've got a 64MB memory card you'd be looking at a maximum of seven shots before it was full. However, JPEG uses some very clever maths to reduce the file size to as little as 1/100th of its original size without reducing the number of pixels in the image, thus allowing you to save many more pictures.
But there is, inevitably, a downside. In order to make such space savings JPEG has to discard some of the information in the original photo. This is referred to as 'lossy' compression, (because something is lost). But it's nowhere near as bad as it sounds! JPEG offers the option to vary the amount of compression, and the less compression used, the less noticeable the loss of quality is to the human eye.
The problem is that each time you open a jpeg and resave it, you take a little of the image quality away from it. Viewing without resaving is OK but if you want to crop, rotate or edit the image and resave it, you will suffer a loss of image quality each time.
It is best to save a separate copy of the modified image and experiment on that and only use your original images for viewing. However, there is a better way of storing your original images (and edited ones) whilst retaining maximum image quality - but more of this in another article (Editor permitting).
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