Hold on tight to your beloved memories
Professional photographers give tips on how to cull, store your digital pictures
Quick — how many photos do you have on your phone right now? And on your camera’s memory card? How about the ones saved on your computer? Maybe a couple of stragglers on an external drive or in cloud storage?
Digital photography has made taking pictures easier and more accessible, but it’s also come with a downside — digital clutter, in the form of hundreds, if not thousands, of photos often spread across several devices.
Getting it all under control can seem like a daunting task, but, according to several professionals the Star spoke to, a worthwhile endeavour if you want to be able to find and hold on to your memories.
Here’s how to do it, according to pros. Prevention is the best cure The easiest way to not have a giant mess of photos is to not take too many in the first place.
“Those kinds of photographers that take a bunch of photos and they just wait for one to come out good, I say, ‘don’t do it,’ ” Toronto photographer Yuki Noda said.
She suggests taking a photography course — the Art Gallery of Ontario and Henry’s both offer courses in the $200 to $300 range, for example — to learn how to take a nice photo, the first time.
“You get a great shot instead of just taking 40 pictures, and then you have 40 pictures on your cellphone that are really about nothing.”
Don’t feel like shelling out for a photography class? There are tons of free online options for beginners all the way to advanced shooters that will set you on the right path — check out the entry under “Best Free Online Photography Courses and Tutorials” on springboard.com, for example. The Star also has its own how-to video series hosted by staff photographers called “Master Glass.”
Sheridan College photography professor Howard Simkins suggests sorting through the photographs you do take as soon as possible — and be picky about what you keep.
“Throw away all the ones that are out of focus, to start with,” Simkins said. “No one needs an out-of-focus photograph.”
For the most part, photos that have people you don’t recognize in the shot, bad white balance or lighting, people frowning and the back of heads can also be tossed, Simkins added. Aphoto by any other name So, what to do with the photos that survive the cull?
“Commenting and labelling the pictures with the relevant information is important if those pictures are to have any longevity,” said Rafael Goldchain, co-ordinator for Sheridan College’s bachelor of photography program. “You could have a million pictures on your computer all labelled ‘NF1234,’ right? So, who the hell are the people in the pictures?”
Noting the people in the photo, either in the file name or metadata, will not only help when you’re searching for certain images, but will also come in handy if, for example, someone who doesn’t personally know the subjects in a photo wants to figure out who the people pictured are.
To keep your photos in order, transfer them off your phone and camera and on to a computer as often as possible and begin sorting and labelling right away — although time-consuming, it’ll save you frustration and heartache in the future.
Sorting can be as simple as creating a series of folders on your computer labelled with dates and locations. Software such as Adobe Lightroom or Photo Mechanic can also help get the job done. Besides a naming system, you should try to fill in as many of the metadata fields as possible — the more information you input, the easier it is to find the photo.
“I use my cellphone a lot to take pictures of my daughter, so I’m always organizing the folders with the date and a title with the main event that was happening on that day, and I try to do that at least once a month,” Noda said. “It just gets harder and harder to organize that later.” Back it up Hard drives fail. Phones fall into puddles. Servers crash. After all the time you’ve put into sorting and labelling your photos — not to mention making the memories the images contain — don’t risk saving all your photos in one place.
“If you talk to people in the industry who deal with any sort of asset management, any kind of data storage system, the rule is always: ‘Three devices in two different places,’ ” said Robert Burley, an assistant professor at Ryerson University’s School of Image Arts.
A cloud storage system — iCloud, Google Drive, Amazon Prime and Dropbox are popular options — can serve as a handy backup that’s accessible anywhere you have an Internet connection, but it should not be your only backup platform.
“It’s somebody’s computer, somewhere else in the world, subject to economic forces,” Goldchain said. “They could close, they can be bought, they could up the fees, they could crash and all your images are on there.”
External hard drives can be relatively cheap and ensure that you’ll always own your photos, but, as technology evolves, be prepared to move them on to the next hardware that comes along.
“Whatever you store locally will end up migrated,” Goldchain said. “I used to backup all my stuff to CDs, and I have archival CDs made of gold, they’ll last until Kingdom Come, but eventually I started moving everything back from the CDs onto hard drives because I just couldn’t be bothered looking through CDs.” Get physical While we may be in the digital age of photo-taking, when it comes to keeping and storing photos, nothing’s weathered the test of time better than good old printouts.
“The rule is, if you really want to keep something for your grandchildren, you should make a print of it, because a print, you can put it in a book or on a shelf or in a box and it will last a long time,” Burley said. “If you take a digital photograph, it seems like it will last a long time, but the technology is in such flux that it’s very easy for the media or the device or the file format to shift and change and become unreadable.” Goldchain agreed. “I’m paranoid when it comes to backup, when it comes to having the image,” he said.
“I mean, film is so stable, whereas digital media, you have migration, you have failure, possibly, and I’m just too paranoid to part with the film, so I have binders and binders and binders of film.”
Although they may not be as numerous as, say, 20 years ago, stores still exist around the city to print photos — specialty stores, such as Rapid Photo, Pikto and Toronto Image Works, all downtown, can process both film and digital files and deliver high-quality prints, while kiosks in certain Shoppers Drug Marts and Walmarts can quickly and cheaply print out files stored on a thumb drive or SD card.
“The rule is, if you really want to keep something for your grandchildren, you should make a print of it.” ROBERT BURLEY RYERSON UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF IMAGE ARTS ASSISTANT PROFESSOR