We are handling so many memory cards and USB thumb drives that it is often quite unpleasant to recognize them all. Sometimes, because it is difficult to find them in the photographer bag, sometimes because all these look alike when plugged into our computers. wouldn’t it be great if we had a simple way to…
Category: Image storage
Our backups after the end of CrashPlan for Home
In the past, I did some recommendations about backups. Today, I insist on the criticity for the digital photographer to keep her eyes on this operation (who did not discovere with horror that some files had disappeard from the hard disk drive?). But this now becomes a central question after CrashPlan announced the end of…
World Backup Day 2017
Sometimes, one wonders whether it is still necessary to repeat it, but it is important (No! critical) to backup digital data as soon as we approach our first computer. Worse, for a (digital) photographer, it’s now critical. Don’t we all have lost already one or more images because of a hard disk crash, a capricious…
No more lost memory cards (Tip)
My personal prophylactics in order to avoid loosing memory cards and photos on memory cards: Always format the memory card in-camera (formatting on a computer may not be right for your camera, same thing about formatting on another camera) Always wait 3 seconds before ejecting the memroy card (or check the red LED flashing on…
CompactDrive PD70x / HyperDrive HD80 firmware
Some people still know about the CompactDrive PD70x Flash card reader. During a long time, it has been considered as the fastest portable hard drive to copy your flash cards to a hard disk. Unfortunately, being a relatively bulky product and no longer supported makes it a problem for the owners still wishing to make…
World Backup Day!
Today is the first World Backup Day as decided by Reddit. And it is a pretty good idea to stress that every digital bit should be regularly backed up. photo credit: Photo Extremist How old is your last backup? Check our articles about the photographer’s backup. Local backup options (External hard disk drive) Local backup…
Mozy throws the backup towel, SafeSync comes in
In the past, I described many backup options and I strongly recommended the use of an off-site backup on the Internet. For this, I had recommended Mozy Backup for the expert photographer. It was a fairly obvious choice of unlimited backup for a very small price (a few Euros per year). photo © 2010 Keith…
CompactFlash is not dead yet
photo © 2009 Sam Catchesides | more info (via: Wylio) We may have believed that CompactFlash was nearly dead as a format for flash memory cards. This is not true yet, since SanDisk Corporation, Sony Corporation and Nikon Corporation just announced they started the development of the next generation of Compact-Flash memory cards able to…
Win a D300s or a 7D
Could you use such a photo camera? Have a look at Lexar’s latest photo competition, ‘Take the Next Shot’ sweepstakes competition on their Facebook page. You could win a Nikon D300s with 16-85mm VR zoom lens or a Canon EOS 7D with an EF-S 18-135mm f/3.5-5.6 IS zoom lens.
5 years of lifetime for a DVD archive
You have been told so repeatedly (I even wrote in 2007 an article about the weaknesses of CD/DVD, a few years ago already), it is mentioned again in an article about backups for the photographers, but there are still some people to believe that the CD or the DVD is a good solution to the…
IrfanView upgraded
The excellent images handling software program, IrfanView, has just been upgraded to version 4.27. Command line options to handle images with scripts (actions) or filters. Addition of a border or a frame. Addition of new filters and file formats. The screen copies options now allow to handle larger objects like a full web page (auto-scroll…
Three cheap image hosting services
Ars Technica has a nice little post comparing three image online hosting and sharing options: Flickr Picasa Photobucket They do not conclude which one is better, merely provide a view about the differences. Good reading.
Best backups (top 5)
Once again, LifeHacker offers us an interesting list of tools recommended by its visitors (from the comments found in a previous article). This time, it can also interest a photographer (like our previous advice about photographer’s backups) since this is a list of the 5 best off-line backup tools. SyncBack (Windows, Basic: Free/Pro: $50) Windows…
Sanho introduces a 640GB photo viewer
For the last few years, I have been strongly recommending the Sanho disk-based photo viewers and portable memory, to empty your Flash cards into a big portable disk drive. Visibly, they have a very powerful technology which leads to features like: Extremely fast copying from card to hard disk drive Superb autonomy Compatibility with many…
Aviary goes free
Aviary, one of the best online graphics edition software, just changed its pricing model. Instead of the subscriptions previously used, they went for a new price structure: 100% free. Supported by new financial partners, they offer their tools for free. Impressive free tool suite. The announcement on the Aviary blog.
SD card compatibility for the iPhone
It’s been a long time since the first complaint of some photographers using the iPhone about the lack of external memory storage on the Apple top-of-the-line phone. There certainly are good reasons from Apple (Ed.: which ones?) but the need is still there. And, in our economy, when there is a need, there is somebody…
A hard disk drive for your backups
We were previously speaking here of backing up your photos, only a month ago. Here is a serious hard disk drive designed for this task:The ioSafe Solo fireproof and waterproof hard drive line with 2TB. Not really cheap at 400$ for 2 tera-bytes, and only a USB 2.0 connection, but it looks sturdy.
All about backups for the photographer
As a summary for the recent series of posts about options open to the digital photographer willing to protect his/her picture files (i.e. backup all photo files), here is a table of contents that should help you find again all solutions I presented over the last 4 weeks. Local backup options (External hard disk drive)…
Backup for the photographer – part 4 & conclusions
Previously, we just scraped the surface of what can be done to archive and backup large amounts of photographic data. While the local storage (hard disc drives and optical drives) are fine, they are not solid enough to protect against all kinds of accidents that we want to be able to sustain. So, we started…
Backup for the photographer – part 3
After exploring the external hard drive and optical drive backup options available to photographers willing to protect their images from accidental damage, let’s see what on-line storage options we have. These all have the advantage of protecting your backup against one aspect of risk management: There is no longer a risk of seeing a local…
Backup for the photographer – part 2
We have been looking into the most obvious option for the photographer willing to backup its large amount of data: The local storage on an external hard drive. Nearly everyone of us at least tried to use this approach. But it is worth trying to understand that there are other very good options that I…
Batch-resize your photos
If you need to resize a bunch of pictures (for example, before publishing them on the web), it is a pain in the neck to collect them all and play with the Photoshop commands. For Windows users, here is a utility program that does exactly this in a nice way: All files of a directory,…
Backup for the photographer – part 1
Any digital photographer is quickly confronted with the bane of computer memory. At first, you notice that you need a lot of DRAM memory to edit your pictures (using Photoshop for example). The solution is easily found: Add more memory (Here come 4 GB of DRAM!) Then, you discover that all those 20 MP pictures…
Develop RAW files on Linux
If you are a digital photographer and you are using Linux, there are some things that seem more difficult than if you are using Apple MacOsX or Microsoft Windows. For example, there is nothing obviously available to work on RAW files (not only JPEG pictures). The solution? GTKRawGallery is an open source photo manager and…