Digital Photography Storage

Digital photography storage is important for anyone who takes pictures they want to keep. There are a variety of methods you can use to store photographs. Let's look at what options you may have.

Memory

Having extra memory cards for your camera is a good short term solution for your digital photo storage problems. Whether your camera uses compact flash, memory stick, secure digital and multimedia cards or xD picture cards for memory having extra ones on hand is a very good idea.

When you go on a trip you should bring extra cards with you, just like you would've brought multiple rolls of film with you when had a film camera. Having extra memory is necessary for most people, but it doesn't solve your storage problems in the long run.

DVD or CD

Many people like to store photographs on DVD or CD. Depending on the size of your photo files you'll be able to get a lot of pictures on a DVD or CD. CDs typically hold about 650 MB of data. DVDs can hold 4.7 GB.

If you want to use these methods of storage make sure that you buy high quality DVDs or CDs that will stand up over the course of time. You'll also have to make sure you always have a device in the house that can read your discs. If you're keeping your pictures for future generations, there's no way of knowing what technology will come out in the future and when discs will be obsolete.

To burn discs you'll need a CD/DVD burner and appropriate software.

Portable Storage Devices (PSD)

These devices are small hard drive that you can transfer pictures onto without the use of your computer. You can simply stick your memory card into the device and download your pictures.

These light weight devices are usually a little bigger than an iPod and can store 20GB-120GB of data. Some have screens that allow you to look at and even edit images in the device. Some also connect to your TV to allow you to should slideshows on them.

External Hard Drive

An external hard drive is a good backup to have for your digital photography storage. A large variety of hard drive exist on the market these days. Some store massive amounts of information. You can get a small USB driven external hard drive for relatively cheap.

Once you put your pictures on your computer you should back them up on a hard drive. Hard drives do tend to breakdown sometimes so I'd recommend that you use some other storage device also. It's always a good idea to have multiple backups incase one fails, gets lost or destroyed.

Online Storage

You can also store your pictures by backing them up online. You can join any number of photo sharing sites like Flickr or Shutterbug. These online services provide you with a space to upload your photos onto their sites. If you want a solution that's more specifically designed for data backup try a service like Moxy.

You can even start you're own photography website or blog and use it as your digital photography storage.

Additional Resources

Digital Scrapbooking Storage Media - Digital scrapbooking storage is a website that provides information on digital media used to store the memories in your digital scrapbook so that these memories can last and be enjoyed in the future.