Use an Archive or Catalog to Protect Photos

When it comes to protecting photographs, you don't need to be a Boy Scout to adopt the motto, "Be Prepared." Archiving and cataloging are two ways of saving pictures for posterity.

• Catalog your image files. No matter how large your image collection, cataloging and organizing your files is a must. After all, having your pictures in digital form does you no good if you can't remember where you stored a particular image a few years down the road.

To make your cataloging job easy, consider investing in a specialized image-management program. These programs not only make organizing your image collection simple, they enable you to assign keywords to each image and then search for images by keyword. In addition, you can print catalog pages that show thumbnail views of each image along with information about the picture, such as the date you last edited it.

• Archive images on CD. Computer hard drives serve as digital storage cabinets for the programs that you install as well as for data files that you create. However, files stored only on a hard drive can be at risk.

If your computer crashes during an image-editing session, you lose all the changes that you made since the last time you saved the image. In most cases, the original image file remains intact, and you can just open the image and start over after you re-boot your computer. But for various reasons, hard drives can and do fail completely, in which case your image files may be unrecoverable.

To protect yourself from this disastrous scenario, use a CD recorder to copy important image files to an archival CD. If you're really paranoid, make two copies of each disc and send one copy to a friend or relative for safekeeping.

Be sure to use a high-quality CD-R disc, which prevents anyone (including you) from erasing the files after they're copied to the CD.

If you don't have a CD recorder, you can take your images to a commercial imaging lab for copying to CD. You can also archive image files to magnetic media such as a Zip disk, but remember that data on this type of storage may degrade in as few as 10 years, while CD-R discs have a life span of about 100 years.