Photographs taken with film fade with age, and even negatives yellow and become brittle.

Digital photos, on the other hand, retain the same brilliant color and clarity every time you pull them up on the computer screen—until your hard disk crashes and you instantly lose every photo you’ve ever taken.


TIPS:

*Use a quality memory card.

While the cheap memory cards offer a huge capacity for a small price, it’s best to pay a bit more and get a quality card. A card from a good manufacturer will have less risk of data corruption or other failures.
Sandisk, Lexar, and Kingston are good choices.

*Get the photos off the memory card.

Use a card reader or USB cable to transfer the pictures to the computer.

*Don’t delete photos in the camera.

Can you really determine which photos are good or bad by looking at your camera’s tiny screen?
It’s much better to transfer them all to the computer, then decide what to keep.

*Keep a backup or two.

I recommend keeping two copies of all of your original photos at all times.
You can archive them to CD or DVD media.

*Use generic photo formats.

It’s best to save a standard JPEG or TIFF version of each photo, even if you use RAW.
Some cameras can save a JPEG file along with the RAW file, giving you the best of both worlds.

*Don’t edit your original photos.

The first thing you should do when editing a photo is save it to a new file. Keep the original, unprocessed, full-resolution file along with your edited version.

*Label, organize, and sort your photos.

Store each batch of photos in a separate folder with a descriptive name beginning with the date. Here are some examples:

2006-08-10 Yellowstone Park
2008-08-22 Testing new Camera

written by Florin C.