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Dealing with digital image overload

6 min read
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Shirl Bark of Cecil Township displays her iPhone, iPad and portable storage device she uses to photograph and store digital images.

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Absolute Images owner Andi Kulbacki shows part of photography’s progression from film to digital. Kulbacki helps her customers print photos off cell phones or take old negatives and reproduce prints.

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Andi Kulbacki fixes a photo in Photoshop before making prints. Kulbacki advises that those with an overload of digital images download the photos regularly, back up photos, edit the photos down and print photos to keep.

In the age of digital photography, we’re taking more photos than ever before – of parties, pets, food, selfies and vacations.

Yahoo estimated that about 880 billion photographs would be taken in 2014. That’s equivalent to 123 photos for every man, woman and child on the planet.

How many of those photos actually get printed is another matter.

That’s the downside to being able to snap dozens and dozens of photos without the worry of having to develop and print film. Often, those images remain on our memory cards and smartphones, creating a heaping digital mess that gets ignored.

“It can get overwhelming. Organizing digital photos takes some work,” said Andi Kulbacki, owner of Absolute Images, a digital photography studio in Washington. “I had a guy who came in who had 2,200 pictures on his camera. He wanted me to print them, and he was joking around and asked, ‘Can I pay you to put them in photo books, too?'”

Before digital photos replaced film and smartphones replaced cameras, people used to print their photos, compile them in family photo albums and scrapbooks, and make duplicates for friends and relatives.

Unlike our parents’ generation, today’s generation is used to chronicling the story of their lives digitally.

Today, traditional photo albums have been replaced by Facebook photo albums, CDs and online storage sites like Photobucket.

“I’m so bad about albums. I can’t remember the last time I put photos into a photo albums,” said Shirl Bark of Cecil Township, who uses her Apple iPhone to document trips, including a recent visit to Ireland.

Bark has embraced digital photography and handles all of her photography, including printing, in-house. She arranges her photos into photo albums on her computer.

Bark prefers digital photos to film, recalling the time a developing lab lost two rolls of film she shot on a trip to Prince Edward Island.

“They were the only pictures I took of that trip, and they lost everything I had,” said Bark, who copies photos to CDs for friends and family. “I like being in charge of my photos.”

Managing hundreds of digital photos can be a challenge, but adopting an organized system will help you get the images out of your camera, onto your computer and onto a print, where you can enjoy them.

Here’s some advice for organizing your digital photos, just in time for the holidays.

Kulbacki recommends downloading photos from your camera and your phone to your computer after every event – Christmas parties, getting a new puppy, a baseball game. But once a month will work, too.

“You have to download the photos onto your computer so that you won’t lose them if something happens to your camera or memory card,” said Kulbacki.

Many people simply erase photos from a memory card and think the card is fine. That’s not the case. When you constantly use the card, you wear down its performance.

Formatting the drive erases everything on it and then re-establishes the directories.

“People want to reuse their cards, but just erasing the images isn’t good enough. If you don’t reformat the card you have in the camera you want to use, it can cause a corruption,” said Kulbacki.

Because we can snap photos freely with a digital camera, Kulbacki said, it’s easy to take dozens and dozens of photos of an event. Ideally, you should edit your photos while they’re in the camera, and get rid of the bad ones. But you can edit photos after you’ve downloaded them.

“Be selective with your shots. I’m trying to break some of my customers from taking 50 to 100 pictures of some event just because they bought a 256MB memory card. Regardless of how many you take, only keep the ones you want,” she said. Review the photos you’ve downloaded on the screen, and delete duplicate, similar and poor-quality shots. Be ruthless. How many shots do you need from your trip to Disney World? Are all of the photos you took of your son with Santa Claus really good enough to keep? Kulbacki also recommends using memory cards with less storage capacity so that you aren’t tempted to take hundreds of photos at a wedding or other events.

Folders are a simple way to store digital images. You can make folders chronologically or by event, or combine the two. For example, title a folder with the current year, and inside it, a folder for each month. Inside the month folders you can create themed subfolders. That way, if you’re looking for a certain photo from an event, you can easily locate it. Put them by the month, or just keep it in a card and label it.

“That’s so important,” said Kulbacki. You’ve got to back up your photos so you don’t lose them.” Kulbacki copies files to an external hard drive, the safest and easiest way to back up pictures. Other good backup options are loading the photos onto USB flash drives or burning photos to a disc. You also might consider paying for an online backup site. And it’s not a bad idea to keep a flash drive with your photos in a fire-safe box, or give a copy to a relative in case something happens to your home.

“Nobody prints photos anymore,” said Kulbacki. “Pictures are a documentation of your life, and they shouldn’t stay stuck on your computer.”

She compares digital photography to slides from the 1960s.

“A lot of people who had slides in the ’60s didn’t get them printed, and their kids are now in their late 40s and 50s, and they run across slides and are getting prints made out of them. We’re almost repeating that,” she said. “All of these pictures that people aren’t getting printed are digital, and their kids are going to run across them someday and say, ‘My parents have all of the memory cards and photos on their computer, and I want them printed.”

Kulbacki recommends getting photos printed monthly (she prints digital photos in a wet lab, instead of using an inkjet printer).

“Make it a New Year’s resolution, to start getting your photos printed,” said Kulbacki. “People procrastinate. Now is a good time to start.”

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