Photograph Storage

[glenafton]

I convert all my photographs to JPEG and keep them in an external hard drive. I have just read an article on RAW photography that states that JPEG files are compressed everytime that they are opened. I take this to mean that I am damaging my photo's every time I look at them. Is this correct and if so what should I use to keep my photo's safe
Glenafton

[mjs1973]

Every time you open and RESAVE a jpeg image, you are loosing information. In order to prevent this from happening, you should save your images in a "lossless" format, such as the RAW image, or a TIFF file. There are other file formats that are lossless as well. Of course these file types are going to be bigger, and take up more hard drive space.

[Didache]

No - if you only open and look at them they do not deteriotate. They only deterioriate if you resave them. Even so, you are much better off, as mjs1973 says, to save in a lossless format. Memory these days is cheap.

Mike

[Photo-John]

A shoot RAW and save my RAW files in a folder named for the subject. Inside that folder I create another folder named Master, where I store converted RAW files as layered TIFFs. TIFF is a lossless format and can be opened with almost any serious imaging software. When I want to make an image for output (Web, print, etc.), I create another folder within the orginal named for the output. There's almost always a "Web" folder and sometimes a "print" folder. If I set up an image for publication I'll usually have a folder with the name of the publication and the final output files for that magazine will be saved in that folder.

[glenafton]

Gentlemen all,
Many thanks for the information regarding JPEG. Now I have the task of converting from JPEG to something else, probably TIFF as suggested. Only 6,7748 to go.
Glenafton

[Photo-John]

Gentlemen all,
Many thanks for the information regarding JPEG. Now I have the task of converting from JPEG to something else, probably TIFF as suggested. Only 6,7748 to go.
Glenafton

Don't bother converting them all. Just convert the ones that you have already selected and edited. They other ones will keep just fine for now. But from now on, when you do decide to edit an image, save it as a TIFF or PSD so that it won't be degraded if you edit and resave it again. I highly recommend learning about and using Photoshop adjustment layers. I believe that's where the true power of Photoshop lies.

[GB1]

If space permits, you might want to save all your unedited RAW files in addition to any adjusted PS files and/or JPEGs. The root files are the RAWs and in theory you should not modify them: this way you can always recover back to that 'base' file.

Of course, if you do a boatload of work in post processing on an image in PS or whatever (with layers, etc), you definitely want to save that file too, so not to lose your work.

The end result of all this is that you will potentially have multiple files for that one image, which is OK if you have the storage capacity...

G