House Grooming

Keep Your Photos Safe from Disaster

When taking into consideration natural calamities such as fires, floods, hurricanes, many plan to take their family photos with them and when the most awful happens, this is often not possible. It is the ripe time to sense and think about how to ensure the future safety of family photos. One best way is to protect a second copy is to keep it somewhere other than your home. It is not always possible with printed photos. An another shortcoming to prints is that they degrade over time. Digitizing is the best way for protecting photographs and many people have already switched to a digital camera. As a first step this is good, but you also need to think about printed photos. Just having digital copies is not sufficient to guarantee their safety. Luckily, by taking action now, you can prevent the loss of your photos to natural calamities.

• Switching to a digital camera should be the priority. A digital camera will always save you the extra step of making digital copies of your photos and in case you are not relaxed using a digital camera, the best idea is to start asking for digital copies when you have film developed. Today most of the photo-processing centers do this, and give you the option of getting the photos on CD or DVD, or uploaded to the Internet.
• An another good alternative is scanning the photos. It becomes much easier to store a second copy elsewhere by scanning photos and even if your old photos are damaged, further degradation can be prevented by digitizing them. One can easily do this himself, or hire a service to do it. Those people who prefer to do their own scanning, most flatbed scanners work well for standard photo prints. One should always consider a film scanner or a flatbed scanner with transparency adapter for scanning negatives and slides. Although there are many scanners which have batch scanning features built into their software, but if yours does not, you can add it through third-party scanning software such as VueScan, or perhaps your photo-editing software can help you to scan multiple photos.
• For example, the most recent versions of Adobe Photoshop and Photoshop Elements simplify batch scanning, with tools that automatically separate and straighten multiple photos. All one needs to do is to load the scanner with as many photos as one can fit and scan the entire scanner bed at a resolution of 300 ppi.

Individual photographs should be saved as PSD, PNG or TIFF files. After this wipe dust off of photos and clean your scanner glass before starting, but don't get carried away correcting scanned photos. One very important thing is to reevaluate your photo backups annually. If you have used DVDs or CDs, make sure they are still readable and make new copies if needed. Apart from all this, if you are using online storage, make sure the site is still there, and that your log-in information still works.