This information is designed to help those of you that are new to digital photography or want to learn a little more about how to protect your valuable photographic memories. Professional photographers no doubt will use more sophisticated and expensive ways to record, catalogue and back up theirs files because their business depends on it. You should see what we do to protect your files! One backup simply isn't good enough. Your family photos are just as valuable to you so let's try and do everything we can to protect them.

Digital photography has become so popular in recent years and that's great but it has brought with it a few challenges for people who are not used to dealing with so much data.

House Fire or Hard Drive Crash - They both have the same effect on your collection of photographs. The longer you own a digital camera, the more images you will end up with and the more prone you are to losing all of them unless you set in place a few standard procedures for storing them safely. Nothing would be worse than having all you precious memories on one hard drive that decides one day to just stop working or gets corrupted in such a way that the data is lost forever - it's almost as bad as losing your photos in a fire!

Storage and Retrieval - Think about the old days for a moment, back when you had a roll of film, went down to the chemist and had prints made and then stored them in a shoebox or one of those revolting albums with the sticky pages. Unless you are terribly organised (let's admit it, most of us aren't) you'd be hard pressed to locate a specific photo easily without upending the box on the floor and sifting through them all.

Storing your digital photos can be like that too unless you get organised and put them into the digital equivalent of an album. The easiest way to do that is to utilise some sort of photo organising software. This type of software usually saves your photo information in a database for quick retrieval. The organizer may also have the ability to backup, edit and print your photos.

There are many applications that are capable of organizing your photo, sometimes you get one with the camera you buy. Probably one of the easier ones to use (and it's free) is IRFANVIEW. You can donwlaod it for free and do all sorts of amazing things with it from sorting your images to changing sizes and making slide shows.

Software like this allows you to tag your digital photos. When you tag a photo all you are really doing is assigning descriptive words to a photo. When you then select that word, you will be able to see all pictures that contain that tag. This is the most important task to do when organizing your photos.

Tags assigned to a digital photo can be as general or specific as you like them to be. For example, you can assign a picture with a tag of a country name, or you can specify a specific city in that country. It’s up to you. Keep your photos in folders that mean something. one suggestions would be to start with a Master Folder for each year, then have separate folders within that one for events that happen such as ...2008/Family/Fred's birthday - with "Fred's Birthday" being a folder within the "Family" folder.

Save First, Backup Second - Once you have copied all your images to your hard drive and sorted them into their particular "albums" with tags, the next step is to save them to a Cd or DVD. I'd recommend DVD's as they will probably last longer than CD's and they certainly hold a lot more images. If you are really conscientious and fanatical baout data safety, you'll make too copies and store one away from home, at a relative's place or bank vault!

Photo Editing - If you like getting your hands digitally dirty, you can get a program like Photoshop, or the cheap alternative, Gimp, and play around with your images. You might crop them, adjust colour, add special effects, change them in hundreds of ways to create something new. The main point to remember here is to always do this ON A COPY of the original file! Always maintain a pure copy of the original file that you can go back to if you stuff things up.

One of the most important points when editing your photos is to start with the end in mind. What do you want the result to be, how will it be displayed? Do you want to send the image to us for printing on a large canvas or will it be used on a web page only?

File Types and When to Use Them - Your camera will usually offer you several options for the quality of image you capture. Unless there is a very good reason not to, I would recommend you ALWAYS USE THE HIGHEST QUALITY SETTING. You can always downsize later but you can't make more pixels later. If your camera allows you to save as a Tiff or Raw file - use it. You can also get away with the highest jpeg setting in many cases but don't settle for less. More pixels, more detail means a better quality print.

If you are worried about how many pictures will fit on your storage card if you use the highest setting, buy a few more cards, they are cheap these days and there's nothing worse than being in the right place at the right time with the right camera but nothing to capture it on!