All About Digital Photos - Storing and Archiving Digital Photos

Digital photos require specific care to make sure they aren’t damaged or lost. The computer environment that digital photos are stored in provides both great opportunities and great dangers. If not properly backed up, a single computer failure can wipe out your digital photo collection. A mistake in editing can overwrite the original photo (your negative) with a new file, making the old one impossible to recover. If not properly archived, a disaster such as fire or flood can also wipe out your entire digital photo collection. The following information will help prevent such disasters.

To properly store digital photos requires the development of a workflow, a standard process of taking, storing, editing and archiving your digital photos. A workflow is generally a personal method reflecting how you like to organize data. I’ll detail my workflow, how much of it you wish to follow is up to you – simply adapt these concepts to your personal way of working.

Please note that references below to digital labelling (the International Press Telecommunications Council standard - IPTC and Adobe's XPM metadata standard) and captioning are described in the section of this site called Labelling Digital Photos.

Backup vs Archive
I use terms backup and archive to mean two different things. Backup is making a duplicate copy to prevent a problem in the event of something like a computer failure. Archive is safe storage and at least one archive copy of your photos should be stored off-site (away from home). In my case, for backup, I use an external hard drive. These drives are inexpensive and a good insurance policy against the failure of your main hard drive. In my case, I use software that automatically backs up my data folders, including my digital photos, to an external drive.

For archiving, I use data DVDs, I still make 2 copies, with one copy stored away from my house (store it in your bank's safety deposit box, at a friend's house, at a relative's house). If your house gets flooded out, blown away or burned down, the archive copy of your photos will still be available.

On-line Backup/Archive
If you have a high speed Internet connection, another option available today is on-line storage. This is where you send your files to a commercial data storage business. The issue here is to choose a reliable firm - the risks are the methodologies they use to store your data and the success of the firm itself (I've had software that's been orphaned by a company going out of business). So, I'm not sure if this type of storage should replace the archiving your photos to DVD, but it could replace or enhance your backup procedures. An example of an on-line backup system is mozy.com

Digital Workflow

Take your photos at the highest resolution/quality your camera will allow. When using a scanner, scan paper documents and photos at appropriate resolutions (usually 300 to 600 DPI).

Copy the digital images to your computer as soon as it is convenient. The software that comes with your camera often determines where these photos end up. In my case I use a chronological system of year and month, within a folder with my camera’s name, so photos taken in October 2007 would be in a subfolder called “2007-10” within a “2007” folder with a folder called “Canon20D”. So the path to a single photo on my system might look like “Canon20D > 2007 > 2007-10 > imagename.jpg”. If you use the default setting of your camera’s image transfer software, it will often put the photos into your “My Documents > My Pictures” folder on a PC system. Note that this is not universal – each camera manufacturer has their own system – check your computer to see where all your original photos have ended up.

Before you erase the photos from your camera’s memory card, make a copy of them to a separate storage medium such as a CD or DVD RW (re-writeable CD or DVD), a regular CD or DVD, an external hard drive or a reliable on-line backup service. This is your backup. Once a copy of the photos has been safely backed up, you can erase them from your memory card. If a lightning surge took out your computer’s hard drive you would still have a copy of your original photos available to you.

The original images from your camera or scanner are your “negatives.” Once these original images are on my computer I usually add my IPTC/XMP data (digital labelling) to the images.

I then create a “topic” folders based what that particular series of photos is all about. Such a topic might be “Rideau boat trip”, “Jimmy’s 6th birthday”, etc. Since there could be several topics related to one camera download, I make as many topic folders as I need. These topic folders are located in a separate “Photos” folder with year subfolders. So the path to one of my topic folders might look like “Photos > 2007 > Jimmy’s 6th birthday.” I copy all my “keepers” to the topic folder(s). I use a thumbnail photo software program to make easy work of this. All future work on these photos will now only be done on copies of the original photos now located in my topic folder(s). My original “negatives” are untouched in my original chronological folders. Since the originals and copies are in two completely separate folder systems, there is less chance of making a mistake such as editing an original photo.

For genealogical photos, specifically digital photographs and scans of old (pre my generation) family photos, I use the same topic based system, but this time using my family names for my photo folders. My topic names now become Watson, Wickenden, Stanfield, French, etc. These are located in a separate “Genealogy > Photos” folder system.

I now edit the photos within the topic based folder. Editing involves such things as cropping, removing “red-eye” and adjusting such things as brightness, contrast and sharpness. Of note, since you are working on a copy of the photo, if you make a mistake while editing, you can always go back to your original photo (in your chronological folder which contains your original “negatives”), make another copy of it into the topic based folder and start the edit again.

UPDATE: I used to caption my edited photos with text written directly onto the photo. I generally do not do this anymore since I now believe that the internal IPTC/XMP digital captioning is sufficient (it's now an archive standard), although with genealogy disks that I send to relatives, I'll still include a set of externally captioned photos.

It is now time to back-up and archive the photos. In my case, a backup of all my files has been made automatically to an external hard drive at all steps of the workflow, but it could also be done manually. To archive your photos write the entire topic folder to 2 CDs or DVDs.

Store one of your archive CD/DVDs locally (in your house) and one offsite (relative’s home, safety deposit box). In the event of catastrophe (flood, fire) your offsite copies will survive. Of note, I don’t erase the photos from my computer so I’m maintaining multiple copies of all my digital photos. Hard drives are inexpensive enough these days that there is no reason not to have your entire digital photo collection instantly avaiable to you on your computer.

Retrieving Photos
In order to find my photos I use a simple visual method. At the end of Step 7, I put one of my archive DVDs back in the computer and use a thumbnail imaging program to make a “contact sheet” of my photos, that is it makes a new digital photo containing 40 small thumbnail images which includes each photo’s name, size and date. This provides a quick and easy visual guide to all my photos (which, since I’m a photographer, number in the many thousands). For quick retrieval, I also find that an on-the-fly thumbnail generation program works well to quickly scan through several topic folders.

There are dedicated photo database programs available (i.e. iMatch). These usually rely on adding keywords to photos to make for a search type of retrieval. I’m not disciplined enough to label all my photos with keywords, doing the IPTC/XMP captioning is chore enough. But for some a photo database system would work well. For most though, the software that came with your camera (which often includes some sort of thumbnail viewing option) will likely work just fine. The free program Picasa (from Google) also does a good job.

Standards:
The above process involves a lot of manual manipulations. There is software available to help simplify that process. A cautionary note here is that when it comes to archiving information, proprietary software systems are to be avoided. The idea is to store your information using long-term digital standards. The assumption is that if someone gets one of your JPEG images 50 years from now they will be able to easily view it with the software of the day. However, if that same photo only resides in your favourite genealogy program or photo album software, that future person may not be able to view it. So, my philosophy is to maintain all of my original data in long term archival digital data formats – these would include photo formats such as JPEG and TIF. It’s fine to keep copies of your photos in your genealogy and/or photo album software, just make sure you have archival copies in original JPEG or TIF format.

Editing:
When a digital photo is taken or an image is scanned, the parameters set by the camera/scanner are applied to that image. With a camera these include such things as contrast, saturation, sharpness and white balance. The end result may not be 100% ideal. Some photos may require editing. This is usually done with software supplied by the camera manufacturer or a separate photo editing program such as Adobe Photoshop Elements. The process is the same no matter what software you use.

Load an image from your “topic” folder into the editor. This ensures that you are working on a copy of the photo, not your original “negative” (which should still be in your chronological folder). Always work on a copy of your photo, never edit the original. If you are planning to do multiple edits, then save the photo in a lossless format such as TIF. In this case I usually add a “-e” extender to the filename to indicate an edited file (i.e. “2007-10-23-5653-e.tif”).

I won’t go into the details of digital photo editing (there are whole courses on the subject). Suffice to say that common edits would include cropping and adjusting things such as contrast, brightness, sharpness and the removal of red-eye. In the case of old colour photos that have colour shifted to magenta, it may involve restoring the original colours.

A genealogical editing tip is that photo editing should concentrate of the faces of the subjects in the photos. Adjustments to such things as contrast, brightness and sharpness should be focussed on the faces in the photos – to make these as recognizable as possible.

When you have achieved perfection, purists may wish to save the final image in lossless TIF format, but for most, a low compression (high quality) JPEG is fine.

Captioning
I like to caption my photos, especially digital copies of old family photos. I use a commercial program called Breezebrowser to do this. It automates the process by adding this a caption space and applying the IPTC/XMP caption data (which you’ve already entered) directly on the photo. Captioning can also be done in any photo program that allows changing the paper/canvas size and manually adding text to a photo. The end result is a new photo, with the caption information written right on it. The photo can be saved as a TIF or JPEG. The resulting image is viewable (with the caption) by any computer program capable of viewing a digital photo. See Labelling Digital Photos.

Archiving
My use of the term “archiving” is a bit misleading since what you are doing is saving your images to the currently best available inexpensive storage medium (a CD or DVD) while waiting for the next best available storage medium to come along (think of the progression of tape to floppy disk to zip disk to CD/DVD). CDs and DVDs have a shelf life (20 to 50 years depending on who you believe) which is sufficiently long that when the next inexpensive storage standard comes along (likely high capacity flash memory) you can move your archived images to that new medium. There are a few rules about CDs/DVDs to ensure maximum archival life:

Use good quality, recognized brand name CDs/DVDs (do not use cheap no-name brands. With CDs, you get what you pay for)
Do NOT put paper labels on the CDs/DVDs - label them with a marker specifically designed for CD/DVD labelling.
Store the CDs/DVDs in a dark place, within the temperature and humidity ranges specified by the manufacturer.

Make 2 copies of the CD/DVD, store one locally and store one offsite (away from your house). In addition, I keep the entire photo folder on my computer’s hard drive. With today’s low prices for high capacity hard drive storage there is no reason not to have enough room in your computer to keep all your digital photos.