Large pictures files

jazzitupphotography · Jun 9, 2009

I tried looking all over the forum for answers but couldn't find anything about this. So this is probably relatively simple haha.

I'm having so much fun with photography and taking loads of pictures, BUT, they are taking up A LOT of space on my laptop. I have an external hard drive but prefer to use it as backup rather than for main storage. So right now I have doubles on my laptop and in the hard drive. I don't keep the crappy shots, the ones that are saved are nice pictures that I don't want to delete. Plus, sending them in emails is a pain, takes about 5 minutes to attach one picture on an email. Also, I can't put them on CD's either.

What should I be doing different?

I have the Canon 450D by the way.

vh5150 · Jun 9, 2009

in which format are you shooting? I am only familiar with Nikon but whatever the Canon equivalent of Raw is may be the problem. I have thousands of of shots saved on computers but they are shot not in Raw so they don't take up much space. Or maybe I am way off??

Josh66 · Jun 9, 2009

What are you saving them as? Sounds like TIFFs, maybe? JPGs are much smaller, just make sure you do any edits on a copy of the original though.

Why can't you put them on CDs?

jazzitupphotography · Jun 9, 2009

They are saved as JPG. How much space should a photo take on a CD? I remember trying to put some pictures on one and it being full but I believe I may have had videos on there also.

I only got my laptop in March so I have only a couple months' worth of shots and they're taking up a lot of space.

Josh66 · Jun 9, 2009

It takes up the same amount of space on a CD as it does on your computer.

You should be able to get a few hundred on a CD, and a thousand or so on a DVD.

jazzitupphotography · Jun 9, 2009

Perfect thanks!

musicaleCA · Jun 9, 2009

vh5150 said:
in which format are you shooting? I am only familiar with Nikon but whatever the Canon equivalent of Raw is may be the problem. I have thousands of of shots saved on computers but they are shot not in Raw so they don't take up much space. Or maybe I am way off??

The canon equivalent of RAW, would be, um, RAW. (Well, some Canons can shoot in "sRAW", which is a compressed format, but I like to pretend that doesn't exist.)

Honestly, these are your photos we're talking about here. For the price of your nifty fifty, you could put together your own external drive with 500GBs or even 1TB if you shop around a bit. (It's way easier than you may think, especially with eSATA; slide the drive into a casing's eSATA slot, two screws in the drive and reader, insert into the rest of the casing, two more screws, plug in, format, done.)

Or, if you have the monies, you could spring for a Drobo. It'll take the dual-local-backups out of the picture and cover your storage needs for a long while. I have one, and have been very happy with it (for it's fool-proofness, not necessarily it's performance, but I'd rather have it than stringing 4 FireWire drives together and backing-up everything myself...bah...).

In any case, you'll always get more bang for your buck with external magnetic hard drives than with optical media, especially if you're up for a little DIY (I swear, with a bit of guidance, it's as easy as building a snoot from a cereal box).