4. File Formats
One of the biggest benefits of digital photography is that you can take as many pictures as you want at virtually no cost – with no developing and printing or film to pay for there's nothing to stop you shooting away to your heart's content.
And today's personal computers come with such huge hard drives that it'll still take years until you fill them up with your digital photos. But there is a downside to keeping all your irreplaceable photos and memories on your computer's hard drive; what happens if (or some would say when) it goes wrong, or is lost through accident or theft? You're left with nothing – especially if, like most people, you print only a small proportion of your photos. With this in mind, here's a few tips on making sure your JPEGs are as safe as they can possibly be…
Backing up
By far the best course of action is to back up all your digital photos.
Virtually all modern PCs can burn CDs, and you'll be able to fit from
around 100 to over a thousand images on a single disk costing under 50p.
If you really value your photos I would recommend making two copies of each
CD you burn, and storing one of the copies somewhere safe – or at least
somewhere away from the computer itself.
In an ideal world you'd have one set of CDs at home and one at work, but of course this might not be possible. If you take a lot of high resolution photos you might want to consider using DVD–R as an alternative to CD–R (DVDs hold around seven times more data than CDs). If you need access to your images regularly, you might consider a large external hard drive (with a FireWire or USB 2.0 connection) to store them on in addition to the CD or DVD backup) – that way if the computer fails you'll still have access to your images.