What Do I Do with All These Pics?

Help!
I am a newbie photographer and am having a blast! However, I can't keep all of these pics on my computer; they are filling it to overflowing! I tried uploading to Picasa which works okay but seems slow. So just where do you keep all of your photos?

Kelly

Back everything up! I have an external hard drive, but even then ... there are people who have 2, just in case. There are many you can find at Future Shop or Best Buy.

Get a bigger hard drive.

I have 6 2TB drives, all in RAID arrays.

Brainstormin wrote in post #13275825
Help!
I am a newbie photographer and am having a blast! However, I can't keep all of these pics on my computer; they are filling it to overflowing! I tried uploading to Picasa which works okay but seems slow. So just where do you keep all of your photos?

Kelly

You could shoot in smaller format, like instead of large, maybe medium, that would be a good start!
And get a hard drive, some are pocket size you don't need a power outlet to run it!
Or a 2 TB they are not too expensive!

Keep your photos on multiple hard drives. The old adage regarding backup was 3-2-1. 3 copies, 2 different media, 1 stored off site. With the large file sizes of today's cameras and the cheap cost of hard drives I just use all hard drives.

crn3371 wrote in post #13276280
Keep your photos on multiple hard drives. The old adage regarding backup was 3-2-1. 3 copies, 2 different media, 1 stored off site. With the large file sizes of today's cameras and the cheap cost of hard drives I just use all hard drives.

I'll second that one. And after you fill up your first drive/backup pair, buy two more. The nice thing about windows is that you can use "disk spanning" on portable drives and assign several physical drives a single "logical" drive letter. Then you can use the free "sync toy" with the echo feature to keep one logical drive as an exact mirror of your working drive.

Your best bargain is the 2TB drive. You can get them for around $75-80 at newegg or tiger direct. A 3TB is about $150 and for almost the same money you can have a pair of 2TB drives for a total of 4TB. As you fill up drives, you can just add more.

external drives (and internal) are super cheap these days, so when you run out of space...just buy some more

sega62 wrote in post #13276027
You could shoot in smaller format, like instead of large, maybe medium, that would be a good start!
And get a hard drive, some are pocket size you don't need a power outlet to run it!
Or a 2 TB they are not too expensive!

Don't shoot in a smaller file size. One day you may want to blow up a photo, but if it's a medium JPG it won't look very good or you can't blow it up much.

Are all your shots keepers? Are you holding the shutter button down and firing nonstop? If you are careful with each shot you'll find that you have fewer to store, but better quality photos.

And definitely get a backup hard drive. I had a drive fail unexpectedly (aren't they all unexpected?), but since I had multiple backups it was no problem. You don't want to be the person writing a post about how all your pictures are gone because you didn't back up.

Brainstormin wrote in post #13275825
Help!
I am a newbie photographer and am having a blast! However, I can't keep all of these pics on my computer; they are filling it to overflowing! I tried uploading to Picasa which works okay but seems slow. So just where do you keep all of your photos?

Kelly

First, welcome to the forum, and to the great journey of photography!

Heh! As you undoubtedly have realized, you have stepped into a bit of "doo-doo" here!

Photography enthusiasts do have to realize at some point that they have more images than they can store with their current disk space, and at that point it's time to spend some money on something more than camera gear.

Fortunately, storage is fairly inexpensive compared to, say, a new camera, or even most lenses.

But you still do have to bite the bullet!

We are here to help, so keep asking questions!

The most important thing a new photographer needs to learn is the location of the Delete button on his keyboard. You don't need 75 shots of your cat, 5 will do. And learning to be judgemental will improve the quality of your photography.

Brainstormin wrote in post #13275825
Help!
I am a newbie photographer and am having a blast! However, I can't keep all of these pics on my computer; they are filling it to overflowing! I tried uploading to Picasa which works okay but seems slow. So just where do you keep all of your photos?

Kelly

I back them up to an external hard drive, but I am thinking of getting a NAS network drive.

Big hdds are super cheap these days, just get a couple of them and like others said, when you import your photos, delete the bad ones, after careful consideration of course.

Don't stop shooting. Don't shoot in smaller sizes (greater compression).

Add a 2TB drive. They're very inexpensive these days.

Then, put together your backup plan.

And this should come as a given, so I don't know if it really needs to be said. But it's a REALLY good idea to make sure that your stuff is very well organized. If you've got 200,000 pictures stored and you want to dig up one that you took five years ago, you REALLY want to make sure that you know how to find it.