Hello,
I swapped to digital several years ago and think it is brilliant. I have been saving all of my photo's to CD which until now I thought was safe. I have now been told that CD's "go off" and that they won't last . Does anybody know a better more permanent way of saving lots (about 100 CD's) of photo's?? I love my photo's and would never want to lose them :rolleyes:. Is there a device which can save that amount of data and how much are they?? Alternatively, are the any websites that you can upload your photo's on for free with unlimited space that nobody else can view?? Whichever way it would have to be able to take jpeg, mpeg and nef (Nikon's own file type) files.
Any advice appreciated.
GG

Not sure about devices but http://www.photobox.co.uk is free and you get so much space free with the option to buy more and pay for prints too. You can share pics or keep private as well as just invite friends to view online its upto you who see's

Thanks!!
Have had a peek and it looks good except that once uploaded you are not allowed to download your images as it becomes their property Also, (unless I am reading this all wrong) you are only allowed to print one immage per day??

I would like somewhere that the photos are still under my control and I can do what I like with them..... or am I asking too much ;-)

How do websites work??? can you buy a website of your own and add your photo's there? How much do websites cost, are they reliable and can others access them??

As you can probably tell, I dont have a clue!!

GG

I use flickr ...a very good site :) You can make the pics private, viewable to all, viewable to friends or family only

Try photobucket you can make the albums private not completely limitless  but you do get loads of space

i am afraid that this is a topic that constantly dogs professional photographers as well as amateurs. As a professional who has a certain amount of work on digital files, all I can recommend is this:  save every image to 2 cds and also to an external storage device. Try to save as RAw or tiff where possible, with maybe a jpeg as a spare. There is no easy option & I work alongside several other pros who al use dfferent methods of storage....the above is my method. There are some goog external storage devices on the market if you do some research

What external storage devices would you reccommend?
Interested as other half is trying to decide at the moment.

Sam do you have a website where we can look at your work. I'd be interested to see your photography.

Sam, would saving to DVD be any advantage over CDs?  Other than space available?

Every medium will degrade but you aren't talking a few years, you are talking 40 - 50 years.... by which time the technology would have moved on and you've moved them to a new medium anyway! Blue ray is the next technology, holding 20 Gb on a CD sized disc and is supposedly more reliable but too expensive yet!

What about a memory stick? Thats where I keep all my photos, it holds hundreds ;) and it just plugs into the usb port :)

Memory stick are susceptible to erasure and corruption. We give them to our customers to use with their medical imaging devices but only with huge warnings that they are for transferring, sharing and moving files only - not good for safe storage. You can get hard disks that have USB interface though. They are more secure. Best thing to do is have backups and duplicates of everything.

G.G. .....I HAVE PM'D YOU

I just checked and on my computer I have just over 23,500 photos which altogether take up just 1.5 GB. So with a lage hard drive, plenty of space to store them and many, many more. (I have 180 GB so it doesn't even make a dent yet.)  I do 3 things: keep them on my hard drive, back up to an external hard drive, and save on CD (or DVD, takes a lot more data) as well. And back up frequently. That way there should always be somewhere to recover them from should it be necessary.

Goldmali - that seems an extraordinary number of pics for such a tiny tiny amount of memory  I use 2GB and 4GB cards and fill them in one days shooting!!!!

I only keep large (full sized) copies of the best photos i.e. any I may want to print out. Any that are just going on my websites for instance I crop and reduce so each are not usually more than 50K.