The holidays have hopefully left you with your favorite gift and a digital card full of images from the family gatherings, holiday parties and the kids with St. Nick.
So now you are faced with sorting all those images, choosing which ones to print put in the family album or store on CD for later. We have some suggestions for the best ways to do this that will hopefully help you keep this task simple and painless. First you will need a good photo based program to organize your images. There are a lot of them out there and choosing one that is right for you will likely be determined by your needs.
Google offers up it's free Picasa program to organize, search & even order prints online from your photos. While this is an inexpensive way to organize your images it offers little in the way of doing anything special.
Next up is Adobe, a world leader in digital imaging, Adobe is well known for its image manipulation software, Photoshop now in version CS2. While this is a great program it is outside the practical price range for most consumers at over $600 but an awesome choice for the pro in your life.
Adobe Photoshop Elements 4 is an excellent alternative. At just $89 for the downloaded version and $99 for the CD version, this powerful little program is perfectly suited for consumer use and includes many of the major features of its big brother CS. It also comes with Adobe Album a great way to organize all your photos. Both of these products have trial downloads available from Adobe's website. Additionally, many of today's computer companies will offer Photosuite by Roxio for about $19 retail or Paintshop Pro by Corel for about the same cost as Photoshop Elements.
Next there is the storage of your images. One of the most common things I see people doing is storing their images on their main computer hard drive. This is fine for a while but eventually your disk will start to fill up and you will notice a real slow down on your computer. To keep your computer running quickly and processing information like the day it was bought, store your files on an external drive, CD or both.
Maxtor external drives connect to your computer with a USB 2.0 cable for fast retrieval of your images. Additionally they come with software that allows you to back up your computer. With 120 GB of storage space, you can keep literally thousands of images in a safe secure place for later retrieval. They are priced at about $.80 per gig or about $ 99 for 120GB drive and can be linked together if you need to expand.
Now you might think we are a little crazy about the external storage, but we also recommend that you back up your images on CD/DVD as well as an external hard drive. The reason for this is simple. Hard drives fail even really good ones. If you are storing all your images on your hard drive and it goes down, you will likely loose everything. Most computers today have either a CD or DVD burner or both. CD's will store about 700mb of information or a little more than your 512 camera card. This is sufficient for most folks, if however you shoot RAW files or are using a multi GB media card in your camera, you might consider using a DVD writer instead. With up to 4.7GB of storage space per standard disk you can keep a whole lot of images on one disk. External DVD burners are very affordable from Amazon.com if you don't have an internal DVD burner in your computer.
If you are really, really worried about loosing your images, you can back up your files a 3rd time by storing them on an online server. Ok now you think we are really nuts, but consider the facts. The one thing that everyone and I mean everyone that has ever experienced a fire, flood or natural disaster wished they could get back, it was their photographs. There are a lot of companies out there offering online storage; you can get a very wide list of these by going to Wikipedia's site. Off site storage offers more than just piece of mind though. You can also retrieve files from virtually anywhere with online access and even share files with friends and family members without having to email everything.
Finally you will want to print out your precious memories. You have the choice of going to your local x-mart or big box retailer to do this or you can actually do it online. One of the best features I have come across in the last year is the no wait photo. I will give you an example. If you go to the local x-mart to get your photos done, it will likely be an hour or more in some cases before they are finished. This is fine if you have the hour to spend in their store. Most of us though have very busy schedules and want it instantly. We are the ultimate fast food society after all. So if you are like me you will go to your favorite retailer's website, in my case it's Costco, upload your images and then choose the store you want to pick up the pictures at. The website which is run by snapfish.com, gives you the time that the order will be ready and you simply go in and pick it up when it's done. Some services require you to pre-pay other require you to pay when you pick up your order. You can also send the images to a store near a friend or family member. All you do is shoot them an email or call them to let them know when to pick up their order. Very cool.
There are other "quick" methods of printing your work as well. You can take your images to the local mini mart, drugstore or copy center and use the Kodak Picture Maker or better yet the Digital Photo Express. Both machines are similar however, the Digital Photo Express offers you the ability to use your credit / debit card to purchase your prints or burn CD's without the aid of a cashier or clerk. You can also order a host of other products from coffee mugs to t-shirts with your favorite photo on it from this self service machine. You can turn out stunning 4x6 prints in about 1 minute and 8x10's in about 3. If your media card is full you can download the files to a CD in about 5 minutes with the Digital Photo Express, the CD is dispensed right at the machine. You can even use blue tooth technology to print your favorite photo from your camera phone. While these machines are relatively new, they are quickly popping up in shopping malls and convenience store across the US.
So you have your photos, they are stored safely for future use and printed to the appropriate size. You can now place them confidently into your family album and close the chapter on another holiday and year past. We look forward to 2006 with great anticipation for the world of digital imagery. New technologies will give us ways to take and share our pictures more easily than ever before and now you know just how to keep those memories for a lifetime. - Aloha
