No matter what your requirements are, and no matter how many images you need to store and manage, you must have a plan -- or even several plans. You might choose to have one plan for digital image files made with a digital camera, another plan for scanned images, a third plan for images that you have digitally edited, and a few other plans for the various projects that you are working on. The following six tips will help you save time, minimize the chances of losing valuable digital images, and enable you to enjoy and share your work more fully.

Create an organized directory system One of the most important and easy steps that you can take to keep your digital images organized and safe is to create and maintain an organized directory system. As your digital image collection grows, you'll find that it's not hard to delete the wrong directory of files or to misfile an image and not be able to find it. You can also end up duplicating files that consume lots of space if you are not aware that other copies exist. Finding duplicates and deleting them after you have added new files to the same directories can be very time-consuming.

Take advantage of Windows' long file name feature - use descriptive folder and image names that clearly remind you of their contents, like "cats," "wedding," "horseshow98," "chap06-image_magic," or "soccer0608-99." When you create a second set of images that can be deleted after you use them, add "tmp" to the folder name, so that you know that all the images can be deleted. For example, you might copy twenty images from multiple folders for use in a calendar. Each of these copied images can be placed in a directory called "monthly_images_tmp," indicating that after the calendar is complete, the entire folder can be deleted.

Make and follow a plan for digital camera images Images taken with a digital camera can create cataloging problems unique to digital cameras. Some cameras sequentially number each image until you download them to your computer. Then, the counter is set back to 1 and the numbering starts all over again. This means that you have to keep each set of images in a separate directory, renumber each image so that the file names are unique and can be stored in the same file folder, or rename them with a meaningful name.

If you use a low-capacity image storage media card, you might find that, over time, you have to create hundreds of directories - each directory filled with images numbered sequentially from 1 to 20 or 30. Such a filing system makes it very difficult to find images when you need them Other digital cameras have a continuous numbering feature, which cases your images to be sequentially numbered until they hit 9,999 or some maximum number then the counting starts again at 1. If you place too many images in the same folder, it will be hard to find the ones that you want when you want them.

Another nice feature offered by some digital cameras is that they time at date stamp each image automatically. Providing that you use the right software, you will be able to find images by time and date. If you want to be able to use this feature, make sure you save your images in the right file format. Not all file formats enable time and date stamps to be stored.

Copy images to removable storage media Over the last five years, the reliability of most hard drives might make you think that your hard drive will last forever - but they often don't. If you have valuable images, make sure that you are writing them to some kind of removable storage media. Remember, the more images that you save exclusively on your hard drive, the bigger your loss will be if you have a failure. On a frequent basis, copy all of your digital images to removable storage media.

Choosing removable storage media Deciding which removable media to use to store your digital images is important decision - even if it does not seem so now as you begin to collect your first few hundred digital images.

Make sure that you store them on the most lasting storage media that you can find. By lasting, I mean both in terms of media that will last for a long time and in terms of the technology that you use to store them an' that you will, thus, need to play them back. A quick review of the brief history of the PC recalls the moves from 8-inch floppies to 5-1/2 -inch floppies to 3-1/2 -inch floppies to CDs and now DVDs and a variety of other media, such as Zip, Jaz, Clik, DAT tape, and others. All of these different media serve a purpose; however, most of them are not going to be around for as long as you are likely to need them for image storage an playback.

My educated guess is that CD technology will be one of the more lasting storage media types that we will see for some time. As more of the online and local photofinishers continue to deliver digital images on CDs, this will become an increasingly important storage medium.

My suggestion, then, is that if your digital image collection is valuable to you and will be for many years, you should store your images on CDs.

Invest and standardize on CD technology. A single CD can hold up to 650MB of images, which is a considerable number of images - all for under $1. If you are thinking about any other type of storage media, ask yourself whether such a playback device will be available to enable you to access and view your stored images and multimedia files in five or even ten or more years.

CD technology is ideal for storing digital image files. CDs will not suffer if exposed to most liquids, such as water or even coffee (provided it isn't too hot!). If there is a universal medium, the CD is it. Most computers have a CD drive as a standard feature, and nearly all photo service bureaus can read them.

Save original digital camera images When you first start shooting with a digital camera, you might have a tendency to delete images that aren't up to your visual standards in order to save space. If you have the capability to store them, my suggestion is to keep all of your images. As you learn more about what you can do with these images, you'll find that it can be useful to have a soft, out-of-focus image or an image that is too light or too dark. It costs very little to store digital images, so consider keeping them unless they are very bad. Chapter 5, "Getting Images Into Shape," shows how you can turn some poor-quality prints into rather astounding images.

In many ways, your original digital files are like the negatives for traditional film. The original images contain the best information and the most information possible about the image that you took. Any time that you run filters and digitally enhance an image, it might look better, but you are altering and decreasing the original image in one or many ways.

If you store original digital camera images in a compressed format and you edit them, you'll have to store them again. If you store the image in the same format another time, you'll decrease the quality of the image in a manner very similar to the decreased quality of a photocopy of a photocopy. Each successive generation loses a bit more of the original image. My recommendation is to use the Windows file attribute capability and tag all of your original digital camera images as read-only files - treat them as valuable negatives and keep them safe and in their original condition. To set a file attribute to "read-only," right-click on the file name in Windows Explorer and select Properties. Then, on the General tab, click on "Read-only." After you have set a file's attribute to "read-only," you will not be able to edit and save the file without again changing the "read-only" attribute.

Consider implementing a backup plan If you spend many hours digitally editing images, you'll want to consider keeping them in a separate directory that is set up to be automatically backed up weekly or even daily. In the case of a drive failure, you could save yourself many hours of unnecessary work. Windows 98 comes with a simple, yet useful, backup utility called Microsoft Backup (see Figure 4.2). If this system utility is installed, it can be launched by selecting Start>Programs>Accessories>System Tools>Backup. If this utility isn't installed, you can install it from the Windows Setup tab in the Add/Remove Programs application, located in the Control Panel.

You can also set up Microsoft Backup as a scheduled task by using another Windows 98 system tool called Scheduled Tasks - it,, too, can be found on the System Tools menu. This is a good way to make sure that your backups are done routinely. You might want to schedule backups when you are not using your PC, because backups can dramatically decrease the performance of your system.

Create extra copies of some images on an organized basis Although extra copies of images can increase your storage requirements, there are good reasons why you'll want to make them. When you begin working on a project that requires the use of valuable images, think about creating a new directory and making temporary copies of those images you need. This will prevent you from destroying the original image, should you mistakenly save an edited image over one of the copied, j original images. It's also usually wise to create an extra directory full of copied images when you use batch-processing capabilities. This will, for example, prevent you from ever accidentally converting an entire directory of high-resolution images into reduced-size JPEG files for a Web page. You might not think that you could make these mistakes, but they really do happen - I've made them myself!

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About the author, Gregory Georges: Using medium format, 35 mm, and digital cameras, Gregory has amassed a personal collection of more that 12,000 pictures -- all taken purely for the fun of it. He has, in one way or another, used computers extensively for work and at home since taking his first computer class in 1969. As an experienced photographer and avid user of computer technologies, Gregory has the perfect background and passion to write about digital cameras and how to get the most from digital images. You can visit him at his website: www.reallyusefulpage.com .

Digital Camera Solutions is published by Muska & Lipman Publishing of Cincinnati, Ohio. You can visit them at www.mlstore.com/camera.html to find out more about this book.

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