Options for storing, retrieving, and viewing your digital photographs

If you're new to a digital camera or thinking about buying a new camera, and you like what you've heard about digital photography, you probably have some burning questions about the technology. What replaces the film? Do you need a computer? What process replaces the development of your photos, and how can you store and display all your photos without having to print them? This is a short guide that will answer these questions and give you an idea of ​​your options for storing, retrieving, and viewing your digital photos.

When you take a picture with an optical film camera, you have a shutter that opens for a fraction of a second, exposing the photosensitive film to light that is projected in an image by the lens, onto the surface of the film. Film stores a negative color impression of your image. Later it's "fixed" and then developed into a "positive" true color photograph in a darkened room (or nowadays, a compact machine that does the same job.)

When you're done, you get a copy of the negative fixed, and the real color photo. The principle of digital photography is not very different. A microprocessor-controlled photosensitive chip wafer is programmed to become receptive to light projected onto its surface by a lens for a fraction of a second. The chip then digitizes this image into a sequence of tiny colored dots, called pixels. This information is stored as a digital sequence, which is then saved in the camera's “memory”. This is the important part.

A camera usually has a small amount of "onboard" memory, enough to store somewhere between 15 and 100 photos. The amount of space a given photo takes up in memory depends on a number of factors, but quite simply, the more detailed a digital photograph, the more dots used to produce an image, and therefore, the sequence of numbers representing these points is longer. Thus, a high-resolution digital photo takes up more digital space in memory.

The great thing about digital memory is that it can be written and read not hundreds, but hundreds of thousands, even millions of times without wearing out. Because cameras only have a relatively small amount of onboard memory, removable memory cards, called "flashcards", have been developed to store larger amounts of data. While your camera can store 15 or 20 high-resolution photos, flashcards can store between a few hundred and several thousand such images, depending on the digital capacity of the card and the quality of the photo.

 

Option for storing, retrieving, and viewing your digital photographs

A flashcard is a thin wafer, between about 1/32” and 1/8th inch thick, and usually not much larger than a square inch. There are several different formats of these cards in common use, and they make up the bulk of common image storage devices. These include Secure Digital; CompactFlash (1 and 2); Memory Stick; MultiMediaCard; xD-Picture Card; and Smart Media. All of these are usually abbreviated to their initial capitals.
Of these, SD and CF are the most common.

You may have heard that all computers speak in 1s and 0s before, and it's true. The standard unit for measuring numeric data is "bytes". For the purposes of this exercise, 1 byte is always equivalent to 8 “bits” which are either a 1 or a 0. So a sequence of eight 1s and 0s is 1 byte. It's a very, very small amount of data. On a computer, a byte is only enough to store a single character, such as the period at the end of the sentence. To make things easier, we work in kilobytes KB (1024 bytes), megabytes MB (1024 KB), and gigabytes GB (1024 MB, or 10243 – that's 1,073,741,824 bytes!).

To give you an idea of ​​the scale, your medium or low-resolution photos on your camera are probably around 500 KB, and your high-resolution photos are probably around 2.5 MB. Commonly available flashcards vary in size from 64MB, 128MB, 256MB, 512MB, 1GB, 2GB, 4GB, 5GB, and 6GB, and some 8GB flashcards have recently been released. This means you can store over 3000 very high-resolution photographs on an 8-gigabyte flashcard, no larger than one square inch! Smaller cards are much more cost-effective, with a 512MB flashcard being between 10 new and 20 new New. The 8GB is closer to the $250+ mark and represents the pinnacle of consumer-grade miniaturized data storage. And for one last trivial point of reference, computers these days come with hard drives ranging in capacity from 80 GB to 500 GB, which makes your computer an attractive option for storing your photos.

If all of this didn't make much sense to you on first reading, don't worry. It is a subject that becomes more complex as time goes on, and people dedicate their lives to its study. The beauty is that you don't have to understand it well to use it effectively. For a handful of dollars, you can store several hundred images. You can reuse your flashcards almost indefinitely. They will eventually get a scratch or crack from friction from being removed and used, and they are very sensitive to static electricity, so eventually, they will fail. For this reason, it might be a good idea for you, or a friend with a computer, to back up your photos to a more resilient medium such as a data CD or DVD.

This brings us to the next point: do you need a computer? The short answer is no, but it helps. Fortunately, the market has developed entire product lines for people who want to remove the computer from the equation altogether, recognizing the demand that existed for such options. These days, you can buy high-resolution home printers that can produce photos almost as good as what you might have developed at the drugstore, that plug right into your camera, or have an onboard card reader. If you have a particularly nice photo that you want professionally printed, most photo developers have facilities for doing so. All you need to do is bring the flashcard or camera the image is on. What a computer gives you is a convenient way to edit and sort your collections. You can still view your photos on the device itself, and most cameras are able to hook it up to your TV, allowing you to browse your photos like a slideshow.

Never before have we had the ability to store so much information so easily. There's a huge range of options for storing your photos, and if you like the idea of ​​some kind of reusable digital film the most, capable of storing hundreds or thousands of photos, then you can take a small handful of 512MB flashcards, and having a photo album so big you could never fill it. But if you do, it doesn't matter: it seems there's a 16 GB Microdrive on the way.....