This may sound like an odd question but hear me out. What do you do with these thousands of pictures digital technology allows us to take, upload and share. Do you have some printed, some not? Do you print them all, and then what? How many hard cover albums would this take? Tell you why I'm asking. My husband and I have separate computers and each of us has photos from past tours--in digital albums--but I don't find I want to sit and look at them, and we don't have thousands like some of you--hundreds maybe. We do share them back and forth, but I'm not sure I want to spend the paltry remainder of my life firing up the digital albums.

We've had ours printed but again I don't have a lot of patience for making up albums. So, the original question: what do YOU do with your thousands. . . . . ?

Well...when we get home we purge them deleting duplicates and fuzzy photos.

The best photos are loaded onto our website
http://peterandlouisephotos.blogspirit.com/

or our blog as part of a post.

We also may print some of them out to display in our flat or send to relatives (not many).

We then burn them all to DVD for posterity. Then on our PC complete another purge to only leave a small number of good photos that we have scrolling by as a screen saver. (But we only do this a few times a year).

I love having so many photos because I find overall we take more good photos and are more adventurous with our photography than we would with just 24 on a roll of film.

Hi Brenda,
A good question as I now have too many albums. Lately I have been storing pictures on the computer, using Picasa, and for others I have burned a cd. That being said, I still purchase hard copies for an album for fear that the computer would crash and all my pictures would be gone. I also love the idea of burning the cd as I can now easily inflict my pictures on unsuspecting company on my tv.

Hi Brenda, I see them all the time as slide show, and every two or three days I pick a different one as desktop background, also print about 300-400 of every trip and put them in albums. I have them all in CDs also. I am planning to scan old pictures, one of these days...

Hi Brenda,

I usually get about one album of pictures printed for each week I am away. I keep them in albums that hold 300 photos but I have a few that hold 200 photos and I try and write info in the space provided next to the photo. They all fit nicely onto shelves in a bookcase. I often take out one and look at it, sit in a comfy chair or sit outside, take them to show people. I spend enough time in daily life staring at a screen, albums are like relaxing with a good book. As time passes, the photos are certainly good memory triggers for me.

I also burn them onto a CD and leave some on the computer but I must admit its easy to get behind with this part of it.

When I first started travelling it was popular to take slides. I have had the best made into photos and am now looking around to buy a scanner so I can put all the old slides and photos onto the computer. Having both albums and photos stored on CD’s is best for me.

Yaya

Hi Brenda

After my last trip I had my favourite photos printed into a hard cover coffee table book. These books are not cheap, but they are a great momento of your holiday. Take a look at www.momento.com.au

Regards
Debra

quote:

Originally posted by Kirk Kastles:
Hi Brenda

After my last trip I had my favourite photos printed into a hard cover coffee table book. These books are not cheap, but they are a great momento of your holiday. Take a look at www.momento.com.au

Regards
Debra

Hi Debra,
I've seen someone else's photos in one of these hardcover books from Momento earlier this year. They looked fantastic!! Certainly worth considering for the next trip
cheers,
ClareS

Brenda,

This is what I do. I review my albums periodically. You need to ask yourself the question "Is there a need to keep this picture?". Give it a critical eye, if the picture is blurred, tilted, is a duplicate, out of focus, or more importantly if it has the doofus who just wasn't paying attention that someone is trying to take a picture and just wanders into it. Be honest, we all have tons of such pictures.

Try to organize your pictures as if you may provide some narration for them. If you find occurrences of "this is a rock from far away, this is a rock from slightly closer, this is more closer and this is the closest we got" you are looking at candidates for deletion.

If you have taken pictures with fellow travelers and don't recall their names, keeping them around won't do much good either.

I had close to 10.4GB of pictures taken by me on various holidays, excursions and outings. Over time I have pruned that to 7.6GB today.

What do you do with it, that is a matter of taste. I am a believer in the paperless world so unless I REALLY require a print, it stays on my disk, backup, online albums.

The idea is to have digital backups of your data, printing it is (IMHO) not a good means of safeguarding yourself against the inevitable. You can always create another digital copy from your backup. You cannot do the same from prints.

Storing it in multiple online photo albums is the best option since optical storage (burning them onto CD/DVD is also error prone, one scratch and the losses can be quite high) too isn't perfect.

I leave you with one final piece of advice, if you feel you want to retain the pictures and identify a subset of them that you positively will NEVER print, shrink them and store them. After all the camera's MP will always be greater than the screen resolution.

So many excellent suggestions. I'm laughing at your second paragraph, Xponent, about this is a picture of a rock, then a closer picture of the same rock etc. You're right, many deletions could be made. My husband edits the day's pictures when we're travelling. I on the other hand like rocks.

Unlike Xponent, however, I don't believe in a paperless world. I want hc of everything. What happens when I'm too old to fiddle around with a computer? But shrinking the pictures, transferring them to CDs, and above all, editing and deleting sound like great ideas. Thanks everyone for your patience.

Also Brenda you can now buy a digital photo frame.. load your favourite photos from the trip and then have an ever changing slide show.. so instead of having numerous frames et caround the house you have one simple frame .. and when you get tired of the selection just go on a new trip to get some new photos..

Folly: I'm a fan of the digital photo frame. It makes a lovely gift for overseas relatives, too.

I was thinking of maybe attempting to make a scrapbook when I return. The problem is, I'm not terribly creative so we'll see how well that goes. I might have to look in to digital frames

I'm no good whatsoever at things like scrapbooking. No patience for it at all. I have not heard of digital frames, so right now I'll look them up.

Kwintesenc: I tried scrapbooking once. If you're anything like me (impatient, klutzy and not "crafty"), you will do yourself grievous bodily harm with the implements and want to drive off a bridge 1/4 of the way through the project.
In my opinion, it makes a nice gift but it's not an effective way to store large volumes of photographs. Too much space is taken by text and frames and decorative pieces.

Hi BrendaC,

First and foremost, I keep all my photos on my hard drive and backed up to DVD/CD's. I keep the really good photos in the directory that my computer uses for the screen saver slide show so I'm always seeing my pictures.

I have a couple of the excellent photos (if I'm that lucky) enlarged (8 x 10 or 8 x 12) and I put them on display in the house. I use clip frames and now I no longer add to the number of pictures hanging. Instead, I switch the pictures since clip frames make that so easy and I was tired of making holes in the wall.

I love the ProShow Gold program which allows you to create a slide show with captions, music soundtrack and a variety of transitions between slides. (A free trial copy of the program can be downloaded from www.photodex.com.) I've even shared copies of the finished DVD's with members of my tour group.

Naturally (but less and less as I travel more), I print up a few 3 x 5's and put them in photo boxes instead of albums. These are the type of box that come with little wooden hanger bars that hold picture holder plastics and each hanger will accommodate about 20 pictures. Depending on the size of the box, they have between 4 and 7 hangers in them. (I've bought them at Winners or Carlton Cards.)

My best friends are those who not only don't resist being shown my photos but actually ask to see them.