Quality And Management Of Photos

[Purple Julie]

On digital cameras you can adjust the quality (or pixels) of the photos before you take them? What setting do you normally have your camera set to? I have my 3MP camera on the highest setting. The photos taken on the higher setting end up being more megabytes on the computer though!

For those who have 6 or more megapixels, do you take all your photos on the highest setting or only some? If you take them on the highest setting, how do you store them? Do you just let them sit on your computer hard drive, or do you burn them onto CD/other and only leave smaller versions on your computer?

[*Bella*]

I have my 10mp camera set to medium, as the files are 4mb each otherwise! I just store them on the computer, lotsa hard drive space

[Guest Tess32]

I take everything on the highest quality as you never know which ones you are going to want to print large

[pie]

I take everything on the highest quality as you never know which ones you are going to want to print large :cool:

Ditto!

I have a 7.1mp camera, i always have it on the highest file size because you can make it smaller but you can't make it bigger

You can back photos up to CDs if you have limited space.

[rubiton]

I take photos on teh highest jpeg - they are on the computer and are then burnt to CD and DVD. Good racehorses get kept on the computer but the rest end up on those CDs & DVDs to keep everything on teh computer would fill it up too much in the end.

[persephone]

Mine are on the highest (5.1) ..heavily culled, and offfloaded to CD's every month.

[wagsalot]

Mines 8 mp and I always have mine on the highest setting.

[Cordelia]

Yep. Same here. Highest setting. Mine are all on my computer though.. must remember to back them up otherwise I am screwed if my computer crashes!

[Ripley]

Same here. I have a portable drive to store all my photos, they aren't on my 'C' drive so if I want to view them, I have to turn on the portable.

[wagsalot]

My OH bought one of those portable hard drives. I just click one button and our computer hard drive is backed up.

Before that I used to back all my photo's up on CD's. Theres no way I could do that now, I have way too many.

[Ripley]

The portable is a good idea IMO. It's always off unless I'm downloading photos. I have quite a lot on there and need to do a cull. I haven't even printed off ONE photo yet and all my European holiday photos are on there - too many to cull, I just look at the amount of photos, sigh, think it's all too hard and turn the drive off for another time.

[dogsforall]

hi all

i take them on the highest setting

but i have a brilliant program for sorting and storing pics it is called thumbs plus

all my pics are stored off line on external harddrive or disks

with thumbs you don't have to have the disk or drive to see what is stored on them and the thumbnails come up instantly with out the disks in

and it will tell you what disk the pic is stored on if you want to edit it saves going through lots of disks to find that one pic

it also edits and does all that other stuff as well

takes up very little room on your comp but thumbnails of the pics are always there for you to see

i have even had friends bring s disk or usb of pics for me to look at and i can still see all the pics even though i no longer have the disk or usb

as you can tell i love being able to see the pics still but not have to worry about room on my harddrive or searching through all those disks to find one pic

i brought my copy at camera house

thanks

dfa

[piper]

I also always use the highest setting. If I get a great picture and want to do something with it I don't want to find it was a reduced quality image. However if I want to use a picture for a wepage or somethng I can always reduce their size.

Once I transfer them from the camera I do a first cull then leave them for a few days usually and go back and look again. It is amazing how a couple of days can change your mind about something. Anything I am not sure about I keep - photoshop can always help it if I decide I want to play with it ;) When I've done the second cull I then transfer them to my external hard drive for stoarge there and get rid of them from my computer.

[amy_h]

I find it's better to shoot on high qual in either TIFF or RAW format to allow for future manipulation. I then save as jpg also for multiple back up and print just about every photo i take. I have an external harddrive and because RAW files can be up to 500 mb, i burn to DVD archive, and the Jpgs to cd. This may not an option on the little auto digis but on my olympus slr's it's how i shoot. It depends on how much you want to spend on your setup.

[Rainey]

I take all of my photos on RAW (uncompressed) and process the photo in RAWShooter Essentials. It is an incredibly storage consuming method as each raw file is something in excess of 8mb and then you create a 4mb .jpeg from it... so thats a total of around 12mb per shot!