Welcome to another edition of Let’s Talk Photography! We’ve been talking about strategies for getting photos off your camera and onto your computer and ways to categorize and label them so they’re easy to find later on down the road. And, now that you’ve started unloading the thousands of photos that you have on your camera’s memory cards onto your computer, you’re probably sitting there cussing me out because you’re starting to run out of space on your computer’s hard drive, aren’t you?

Yes, that’s one of the downfalls of digital photography. Back in the day, you were restricted to only taking as many photos as you had pictures on a roll of film. Knowing that your film only had 12, 24 or 48 frames meant you were very careful about taking photos because it cost money for every frame that you snapped. Images were much more important and deliberate. Today, you can take as many photos as you want and it’s all free! Every moment in life, whether it’s the food you’re eating or a quick selfie or every single step your baby takes in his or her first walk across the floor, you just keep on snapping. How wonderful is that?! Well, now that you’re trying to get your photo collection in order on your computer, you’re starting to realize how terrible it can actually be, especially if you’re the proud owner of one of today’s latest cameras that take 40 megapixel images. They are HUGE! So, I think this is a great time for us to talk about taking out the trash and getting rid of a lot of the junk that doesn’t make the cut.

Snap happy photo enthusiasts capture everything and anything. In my experience, 90 percent of all the photos I take in a single session don’t “make the cut.” What that means is, I experiment a lot with the settings as I’m shooting. I like to see what I can do with my camera and how I can creatively change things up. In some cases, I’m shooting several frames at different exposures so I can blend them all together to make a High Dynamic Range version of a single scene. That means I have a lot of photos that are of no use, not to mention the photos that didn’t focus quite right or the ones that just missed the action and look awkward or terrible. This is where discipline must come in so you don’t fill up your computer with garbage.

Every time you move photos from your camera to your computer, you should take the time to go through them really quick and find the ones you don’t like. Better yet, find the ones you love and give them a star rating or a color label to indicate that they are keepers. No matter what software you are using there will be some method of flagging or marking your favorites. Once you’ve done this, go through a second time and make sure you didn’t miss any. After the second pass, highlight all the ones that didn’t make the cut and hit the Delete key with extreme prejudice! Don’t hesitate! DO IT!!! Getting rid of the ones that don’t make the cut will help keep your computer clean and your photo catalog appealing.

Another way to make room on your computer and prepare you for disaster at the same time is to archive your photos to a backup location. Backups can be stored on an external hard drive that is equal to or larger in size to your computer’s hard drive or you could archive to a set of DVDs or Blu-Ray discs. One good way to do this is to make it part of your schedule to put all of this year’s photos on discs right after the New Year. If you have an external drive, plug it in once a month and transfer all your photos from the month to the external drive, then unplug it and put it in a fireproof safe. If you leave it plugged in, then you are running the risk of reducing the lifetime of the drive just as quickly as your computer.

If you are really serious about preserving your memories, then you’ll go a little further and invest in an external drive system that has multiple drives in it and operates as a RAID storage device. RAID stands for Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks. A device like a Drobo (please look it up on the Internet and get one) can have 3 or more hard drives inside and it saves your photos on all three drives at the same time. By doing this you are nearly eliminating the risk of losing your photos because, unless the whole device suffers a catastrophic failure, there is a very tiny chance that all three drives will fail at exactly the same time. If one drive fails, the other two drives are still storing the photos. You can quickly swap out the drive that has failed and replace it with another one, and the files will automatically be rewritten to that drive giving you the redundancy you had before the failure. Having one of these systems is truly a life saver when it comes to keeping your photos safe. Having two, even better!

Of course, even a Drobo can fail so you must always be vigilant in backing up and checking the health of your system. If you’re truly paranoid, print every photo that means something to you and put them in a safe place.

This ends the current topic of Preserving Your Memories. We’re going to get back into the camera in the next edition. I hope you learned something from this discussion.

Until then, happy shooting!

Is there a topic that you’d like to learn more about? Send feedback, share your photos, or offer topic suggestions to talkphotos@ecklof.com. If you’re looking for a place to connect with local photographers in Chautauqua County, search for the group “Shoot ‘n Share Chautauqua” on Facebook.