Losing Image Quality

Hey everyone,

I wasn't sure where to post this so I'm going to throw it in here. Over the years I've put together a nice collection of close to 200,000 photos. Thanks to ignorance, I've been keeping them all on a single hard drive this entire time. Now I know some of you just had a mini heart attack, but I've wised up and I went (possibly overboard) and bought 3 backup drives to copy them to. My question is, when copying the images to the new drives, do the image files lose quality? I know this sounds stupid, but I read somewhere (maybe here?) that when you copy a jpeg or RAW file each time you make a copy it degrades in quality slightly. If this is true, what can I do to avoid this? Thanks in advance to anyone helping this computer illiterate dummy.

Image files are comprised of 1s and 0s like any other data file. Copying a file from one drive to another should not have any loss of data and therefore, no loss of image quality. Computers wouldn't be very valuable to us if they lost random data every time we use them.

Copying files from one drive to the other won't degrade image quality.

But saving a jpeg file in an image editing program several times will degrade image quality as some of the data is lost each time it is saved.

Steve

Woolburr wrote in post #16355330
Image files are comprised of 1s and 0s like any other data file. Copying a file from one drive to another should not have any loss of data and therefore, no loss of image quality. Computers wouldn't be very valuable to us if they lost random data every time we use them.

True, but it would sure explain a lot!

There is nothing to worry about -- the files will remain the same.

Bryan

Thank you guys! Appreciate it. Now I know the difference.

If you open a .jpg, then save it, you will lose information. If you open the .jpg, then close it without 'saving', the file will not be altered so no loss of information.