What do you do with all your Photos?

[VegasGeorge]

Back in the film era, I was mostly broke all the time, so my photography was sort of self-limited. I couldn't afford too much film/processing/printing.

Now in this digital world, the sky's the limit. I already have hundreds of pictures, and I see thousands more coming. Storage is not the problem. (Or in a strange way, perhaps it is.) What I mean is, what USE do you have in mind for all those digital images? What are you going to do with them that makes it worth having them in the first place?

[steven]

I have my keepers in frames on my walls both at home and at work.

[VegasGeorge]

OK, that's a start. But, I'd run out of wall space, and my wife would run out of patience, long before I ran out of "keepers."

So, one idea I had was to set up a flat screen monitor, and run a continuous slide show. Actually, I'm thinking about doing that at our Community Center as a Photo Club project, rather than at home. But, it might be just as good an idea there. What do you think?

[thomasrhee]

For me, my photographs are:

1. Memories of a place and time which to me is priceless.
2. A means to see improvements and changes in technique and style over a period of time.

Hard drives are cheap enough these days that I can store thousands of images with each image only costing approximately a penny to store.

I use iView MediaPro to catalog all the images and it makes it very easy to organize all the photo's for easy retreival. Images can be retreived by date, subject, keywords, categories, location, image type, camera make/model, lens make/model, etc... A modern day photo album if you will which I browse thru every now and then.

Some images get printed (up to 13x19) and framed to put on the wall or to give as a gift, some get put on my personal website for friends and family all over the world to see, some get printed at 4x6 to make scrapbooks for certain occassions, some get printed for printed for greeting cards, etc...

The slide show setup is a nice idea, although a bit expensive if you want to do it right by setting up a wireless network with a cheap computer hidden out of sight and with a decent sized LCD monitor. If you're using Mac's, the new Mac Mini would make for an aesthetically pleasing setup using Airport Express.

[Reflection]

My photos are shared with family and family friends, friends and online communities. I get feedback on them and it helps me to learn, and can start conversations with fellow photographers which brings more friends.

Some I print out for my walls, some go in my school diary as decoration. I enjoy looking back and seeing how I have improved, what I've learnt since that photo was taken etc, it makes me feel good about my skills that I've picked up. Others are just aesthetically pleasing for me (and others), or bring back memories for me.

[Moppie]

Why does a dog bury a bone?

[RockSlut]

My rock'n'roll photos get published to the website (http://www.rocksluts.net.au) my girlfriend and I run.
Photos that are not relevant to our website are published as a part of my "photo of the day" blog (http://www.livejournal.com/users/rocksluts).

[JBillings]

I love shooting basketball (5th grade girls). Our girls get 2-4 prints from each game so they can make their own scrapbooks. I guarantee the grins, smiles, and even screams are the best payment anyone could ask for! I even print of few for my walls:)

[KelliShaver]

Most get stored on the hard drive, then later backed up to CD or a 2nd drive. I own a computer repair shop so we always have piles of hard drives, so I don't see that this'll be a problem for me.

Some get printed and hung up around the house, or the shop, or in the display counter down there. Others get printed at 5x7 and stored in a binder.

[Avalonthas]

I usually save 10% of the photos which pass my quality test on my main half terabyte hard drive. The rest of the shoot goes on one of half a dozen 200 to 200+ gig secondary drives for storage. A permanent DVD is also created and filed for longterm storage. Files older then 365 days are automatically deleted off the secondary drives, and if i need past photo's, i use the DVD's. The only thing i dont delete is my main harddrive which has to be deleted manually and i also have a 80gig Thumbnail drive where a photograph thumb, 200x200 max approx is stored for all the pics i take. The entire process is fully automated. Easy storage. Thanks IBM who hooked it all up for 200 bucks (harddrives at my expense).