I have about 300 pictures on my hard drive that I want to backup,
but I don't know if I should backup the original photos or the
edited photos? Does it matter? The edited photos where done in
Photoshop elements 2, I mainly did edits like brightness and
contrast. Now if I backup my originals I will have to redo the
edits if I ever plan on printing from them again. What do you
recommend I do?
The easiest thing to suggest is back everything up. That way you
can decide later whether you want to start with the originals or
the edited files.
What I do is group my photos into albums, either photos of a given
month, or photos at a special event. In the album, I build a
static web site that includes subdirectories with the originals,
the large pictures (1600x1200 on my camera), the web sized pictures
I use in my external web page (800x600) and the thumbnails
(200x150). So far, I haven't had an album that was more than 650
megabytes (ie, the size of a CD-rom). If I get several albums that
fit on a single CD, I do bunch them together. I then make 2 CD
copies, one that I keep at home, and I kept the other in my office
(when I had a job). I also have duplicate copies on another
computer, do tape backups of the entire system every 2 weeks or so,
plus have the external web site which has the small and thumbnail
versions of the pictures (though soon I'm going to run out of space
there and I'm going to have to start removing some of the of the
older pictures). This is probably too paranoid for many people,
but I seem to attract disk crashes.
), you may very well want to revisit some of your originals and apply your new editing skills!
