Saturday, November 25, 2006

Does Anyone Else Worry About Losing Photos?

Once upon a time a friend of mine travelled in France and took many, many precious photos of her time there. She was researching a book at the time and so the photos, as well as being souvenirs, were valuable in other ways too.

She returned home, jetlagged but happy, and her digital photos were promptly downloaded onto her computer. The very next day her home was broken into and dastardly thieves made off with her computer.

*POOF!* The photos were gone forever. No discs or copies had been made.

When she related this story, even though it was some years after it happened, my heart gave a tragic lurch for her loss.

Oh, photos are so precious to me! I am probably the most camera-happy person you're ever likely to meet that is not actually a photographer by trade.

But I've been realizing I haven't been as careful as I should have been with some of my photos. Although I copy my travel photos onto disc right away, my day to day pictures are not always backed up, and recent computer problems have underlined the possibility that I could easily lose some before I get around to sharing them.

I'm just so glad I made physical copies of some of my favourites (or emailed them or put them on my blog) because it seems they have gone *POOF* on me. One was from a night at the Crow & Gate Pub two years ago and I'm just thanking my stars that all my friends have a copy besides the one hanging on the inside door of my kitchen cupboards.

(That's the best place to have photos if not actually on your wall...in your cupboards. You open the door to grab some cereal and there are your favourite people smiling at you.)







Anyway, I was talking to Kim today about taking so many photos and forgetting to share the ones that don't always make it to the relevant blog posts. Time passes and I say to myself: 'oh, I already wrote about that event', or 'that happened two months ago so everybody already knows about that' and I don't get around to showing the pictures to anybody.

They are lost in my computer's picture file vortex forever.

So, my long-winded point here is that I want to share these pictures (and others I'll be posting soon in random re-cap posts) so that all my dear friends who care to have some of them can right-click and nab themselves a copy.

Then when Spider Girl's computer goes bye bye next time, she won't work herself into such a froth. :)

9 comments:

Dagoth said...

Hi Spider

So many lovely smiling faces...I started a project a while back of scanning all my non-digital photos and burning them off on cd. Now this seemed like a good idea but it turns out to be a much larger project than I ever imagined. I continue to this day, with no reasonable end in site, and hope that someday I shall actually get them all scanned in. There are photography shops that will do this for you but I seem to like doing it the hard way, plus it gives me an excuse to look at photos that I haven't looked at in a long time. I never store the only copy on my hard drive because I never met a hard drive that I trusted...

Lori Stewart Weidert said...

Timely post; I just bought a package of CDs and have spent part of the last 2 days backing up my photos; I have 2 years worth of photos on my laptop, not backed up, how stupid is that?!

So, I'm creating a CD image file, with a little inventory list of which are on which CD. It's not that I'm uber-organized, just that I know that lurching feeling of which you wrote.

Great photos, glad you posted them for all to see.

Barry said...

Sounds like you have a good idea there.

You have lots of nice smiles of friends...seems like it would be bad to loose them

blackcrag said...

Earlier this year I thought I had lost my photos from my trip to Calgary. These were backed up on CD, and it was the CD I'd lost.

I was lucky though, becuase Dad had kept a copy of them on his cimputer and burned them for me, and naturally, once he did that, I found my original disc.

kimber said...

Oh, my beloved France pictures.... that story is just agonizing to remember, and that thief better count himself lucky that I never found him, because if I had, he would've met a quicky and messy end! RAR!

But I try to look at the whole thing philosophically -- it gives me a very good reason to go back.

Thanks for pictures, Spider! I've downloaded them all, and will soon commit them to CD!

Helene said...

I really need to do that too... I think I will go out and buy cd's today while I am thinking of it! Oh and btw fun photos!

Mike said...

Me too...

And I go to the extra lengths of processing all my photos like the damn perfectionist that I am, leaving a bulky trail of Photoshop files and jpgs all over the place. I got a DVD burner a few months ago because CDs just weren't big enough. I even got a membership with Flickr so I could back them up there, but I don't have the time for it all... Not even on a snow day.

ZooooM said...

I also worry about losing photos. Luckily, Mr. Zoom is an IT guy by trade. We have oodles of back up, both at the house and off site. I did have a c drive roll over and die on me before I met Mr. Zoom, and I lost a good chunk of pictures. I can't even imagine losing anything as important as vacation photos.

adman said...

you can get a 320GD external hard drive at future shop for $160...much bigger and faster than burning to CD/DVD...thats what I just did.