Pineapple Fountain, Charleston, SC
It's time to whisk you back to the Lowcountry.
Larry Collins from WCBD Channel 2 called yesterday to see if I would talk to them for a few minutes about saving digital image files. Wowza! It must be my fifteen seconds of fame :). Larry and cameraman Malik met me down at the waterfront park and hooked me up to the microphone.
The story is that someone found and turned in a camera memory card full of peak moments - birthdays, births, weddings. These are the pictures that become a family's history. If the owner hadn't saved them elsewhere they are all gone. Sad but I bet it happens a lot.
There are a lot of choices - saving to your hard drive, USB drive, external hard drive, burning to CD's and DVD's.
You all know what I do - I am a loyal smugmug.com member. I upload directly from my cards to smugmug and sort things by events or time periods. I had to have some system because I need to be able to tell folks where to go to look for event pictures and people are always calling me to find pictures from years ago. I am not an artist or professional photographer but I am a workhorse photographer and deal in bulk!
There are many free storage sites and smugmug does charge $39.95 a year but it has such attractive album displays and viewers have access to the full resolution image. I've been pleased with orders I've placed. It's been well worth the annual fee. I can get as many as 80,000 hits in a month with a few events where I have handed out the link.
Online storage sites:
Flickr.com
snapfish.com
Kodak.com
Photobucket.com
Smugmug.com
Flickr even has a Museum of Found Images album where members upload pictures they have found.
New Eye-Fi wireless will let your images flow from your camera to your computer or without taking the card out of the camera. Sounds like a dream!
One thing I did mention and need to do better at myself is to make sure someone else has the login password to my site in case something should happen to me. It would be a shame for years of photos to disappear.
I spent hours going through my grandparent's drawers of black and white pictures. I have a sneaky feeling that although we take a lot more pictures these days we won't have as many to leave for the next generation if we aren't paying some attention to how we are preserving them. With the older film cameras we automatically had built in back up with our negatives.
Larry expects the spot to air tomorrow, Thursday on the 6 pm news. Thanks guys! Make me look good.
Good info and links. Congrats on the TV spot. You are famous! What fun! One thing I do miss is holding my photos in my hands or passing them around in an album, so I print some of the better ones to just have them. The good thing is, I can delete the bad ones and never have to look at them again.
ReplyDeleteOur local and international celeb! LOL!!
ReplyDeleteSeriously, thank you for the tips and sharing your pics of a wonderful adventure for helping those grateful, precious people. MORE MORE MORE pics and blog about that adventure, please.
Jarart: Famous - heheh. That's cute. We'll see how it turns out. I agree about the hardcopies. It's almost a cool novelty to hold a photo in your hand now.
ReplyDeleteAnon: Thanks! I used to do a lot of travel stuff on the old blog. I am more hesitant on this one since it is part of the City Daily community. Not sure how much the Powers that Be tolerate.
I wasn't home at 6 but I recorded it. Well done! And a great plug for Charleston Daily Photo. Let us know if Channel 2 finds the owner of the memory card.
ReplyDeleteThanks Mike. It's still odd having the camera pointed in my direction. I hope they find the family. Those are years of photos they have lost.
ReplyDelete