Savings Photos to a Disc

[k_thornburg]

If this is the wrong thread, I apologize.

When I try to copy my photo files from the harddrive to a CD-R or CD-RW, a dialogue box pops up and says something about the 'thumbs' attached, or that there is information attached to the thumbs that may be lost during the copying. What is this and will it harm the integrity of the photos?

Also, if you move photos around, say from one computer to a disc, to another computer, to another disc back to the original computer, can that make the quality poor? Kind of like with paper, and a copy of a copy of a copy never turns out good. With each copy you get poorer quality. Is the same true when moving photo files around? They are all jpegs by the way. And when I move them, I usually take a copy from my harddrive, put it on a disc to take my work computer, download them there, edit and make changes, then burn on a separate disc and copy back to my home computer.

What is the difference between hi-res and low-res photos on a disc? How do I know which one I'm doing?

I'm an amateur photographer, and I just started taking photos of people, and then giving them discs with copies of their photos for them to get printed. Is there a better way to do this? I've considered getting one of those portable hard drives to keep from copying photos from one place to another and back, so that the finished disc would only be a first copy. This is really getting frustrating and I don't know how else to make sure the quality of the copied photos are good when I give them to the customer. any help is appreciated!! Thank you!:mad2:

[SmartWombat]

Also, if you move photos around, say from one computer to a disc, to another computer, to another disc back to the original computer, can that make the quality poor?

Good question, fortunately the answer is no - just copying doesn't change the quality.
But editing a picture and saving the changes does lose quality in a JPG image.
So if you can - edit only once. You can make as many changes as you like while editing, that doesn't matter.
It's each time you save your changes you lose some quality.

[k_thornburg]

thank you! good to know...anyone else on the other questions?

[bluesguy]

thank you! good to know...anyone else on the other questions?

Why not simply copy your photos to a flash drive, take it to work, edit your photos as you see fit, create a folder on your flash drive called "changed" and save the edited photos in it/
You still have a copy of your originals plus the edited photos in one place and you won't need to do all of that burning of discs. Take the flash drive back home, burn one cd/dvd
with the edited folder and you should be good to go.
Or:
create an account with box.com or some other "free" online storage outfit. You can then create folders and upload the edited photos into them. The good thing here is that you can create multiple folders for your people and give them access (read/write) to them.
Thus the folder named "Bob" will contain photos only for him, and so on..........
Hope this helps a bit.


bluesguy

[Ron Kruger]

Whether a picture is "high-res" or "low-res" is determined by the way it is shot and how it is processed with software. Copying them to disk doesn't change any of that. A CD is just a storage device.
"Thumbs," I believe is additional information about the original creation of an image, before conversions or processing in software programs. When I send images I have processed and cut down small enough to be emailed to magazines, if they don't like what I have done, they can expand the file according to the thumbs to get my original information and start all over.
Most don't do this, but the design artist at one of the magazines I deal with regularly told me he always expands everyone's images and coverts them to TIFFs for reproduction. (I haven't figured out how he converts pictures originally shot as JPEGs to TIFFs, because I can't do that.)
Anyway, what I've found is that on images where I've messed around in editing programs other than PhotoShop, I sometimes get the same message about thumbs when trying to copy them to disk. What I think it means is some of that expandable information can't be transferred, for whatever reasons, but it doesn't effect the quality of the image at all or change it in any way I can see.
What I suspect is that some of these editing programs (especially those you get for free), don't have the capability of storing and transferring the original image imformation, but save only the information your saved as you edited the image in their program.
The longer I do this, by the way, the more I concentrate on getting the image right at the time the shutter is pushed, and the less I try to alter the image in any processing software. I do just enough to make it fit the email MB requirements and sometimes hit auto-contrast, and, like Wombat said, I only take it into PS once. If I decide I want to do something different with the image, I download the original from my camera's memory card and start fresh.
I've put all this together peacemeal, through trial and error and speculation. Maybe someone who knows much more than I about software languages and how different types of hardware and software devices communicate with each other can help us all out--because I have a few questions as well.
And if I'm wrong about what I have surmised, please tell me.