Monday Q&A | My hair, my favorite kid to photograph, & storing pictures
Every Monday, I answer a few of the questions that my readers send me. If you have a question you'd like me to answer in a future Q&A post, just leave me a comment here or email me (thefrugalgirl [at] gmail [dot] com) and put Q&A in the subject line. I look forward to hearing from you!
First up, a while back someone asked about my haircut in the comments of this post and I never responded (I really wish I could manage to be better about answering all the questions in the comments!). It's basically a very layered cut with some long bangs that are meant to be swept to the side, and goodness no, I don't mind if you copy my haircut. It's not like it's a super-unique style that I've copyrighted. 😉
I wonder if you have a favorite child of yours you like to photograph better than the others. NO! I don't mean to suggest you like one better, but I wondered if one was more appealing to capture in photos for whatever reason. They stand still in better poses, they aren't shy, they ham it up for the camera or they simply won't let you take a picture so when you finally get a good one, you shout, "YAY!"
-Glory
I'd say that Sonia and Zoe are probably the easiest to photograph. They're the least likely to give me a fake smile, and I think they're most accustomed to being photographed (I got really interested in taking pictures around the time that Sonia was born, so the two of them have never known anything different).
I also tend to be around them the most because they need me more. For instance, at the beach, I'm most likely to be directly by Sonia and Zoe, and the same goes for when we're at the pool or at the park. For obvious reasons, I end up taking more pictures of the people who are right around me.
The same thing happens when I babysit other people's children...when I watched my nephews for a few days last fall, I had way more pictures of AJ than of the other two boys simply because AJ needed more watching!
Joshua and Lisey don't mind being in pictures, but Joshua hates having to pose for pictures. He much prefers for me to take pictures of him while he's occupied with something. As long as he doesn't have to look at the camera, he's good.
I have a question for you about preserving photos. I was wondering what you do with the photos you take. I read on your blog that you upload them to Picasa. After that do you delete the memory card and reuse it? Or do you save the memory cards as back up? Do you burn the photos to cds? Do you print them out? Do you have a hard drive where you store all your pictures?
I was reusing memory cards and burning photos to cds as well as putting them on an external hard drive as back up (infrequently though) I seldom ever print photos because of the cost, but I love taking them!
I am trying to figure out the best way to preserve memories and I'm just not sure which of the above methods (or a combination of) is best... I'm worried about the longevity of cds vs memory cards and the unpredictability of computers (ie: losing pics because of a virus).
Chelsea@Sowing Dandelion Seeds
When I unload my pictures onto my computer, I always delete the data on the memory card. With the amount of pictures I take, I'd rack up an enormous memory card bill if I didn't empty the cards out!
The backup system I use is one Mr. FG built for me...he designed a computer with mirrored hard drives, which means that all the data on one hard drive is copied to another automatically. You don't have to have a built-in hard drive, though...you can buy an external hard drive and use it to back up your photos (I'd back them up once a week or twice a month, depending on how many photos you take).
I've considered signing up for a cloud storage service as well, though, because if we were to have something like a house fire, my mirrored hard drives wouldn't be worth a thing. An online backup storage service has a definite advantage there.
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Readers, how do you deal with digital photo storage?
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Today's 365 post: Goodbye, small bike.
Mr Chelsea (aka Nick, haha) is nowhere near as technically savvy as Mr FG to have a mirrored hard drive so we just use a portable hard drive and do an automatic backup fortnightly when we pay our bills online (bills and photos are unrelated, it's just a habit we got into to make sure we actually back up our files) but also do it every time we load new photos too, just in case. We had a bad cyclone where I live in February, and the hard drive came with us to our safe house (aka my parent's place) in a plastic tub with a lid along with our other valuables/important documents. It & all our other important stuff just lives in this tub in the bottom of our wardrobe so if there was a fire or cyclone or any other big deal we can grab it and run.
James and I have had two external hard drives die on us in the past. I am on my third. I had most of the phostos from our first hard drive on CD Roms so most of the photos were retrieved. (I am still trying to retrieve about a year's worth of photos from that hard drive. Not giving up yet!) James was able to find some software to extract all the files on the second external hard drive that died. So nothing was lost that time. Now we have a photo archive on each of our laptops and we each have an external hard drive for our laptops (he has a mac and I have a pc). I'm investigating online backup now because of the uncertaintly of external hard drives, the concern of loss of hardware in a disaster, and the convience of setting it to automatically back up our system.
First of all, you do have a great hair cut!
We back up all of our photos on an external hard drive. My husband routinely backs up our computers, so it just falls into the rythym of things. I've also considered an online storage something, but for now, I think it would work (and possibly be more frugal?) to keep an extternal hard drive at a family member's house and just routinely back up our photos there.
My husband uses SmugMug online for photo storage & sharing of photos and we also use Carbonite online backup from my computer which has far less photos! *S*
btw - Carbonite has is linked to Ebates so you get a % back if you buy through that portal.
Thanks for this answer to question regarding storage. I have been contemplating setting up cloud also since my desktop is older and acting very strange. I do not want to lose information I have worked hard on for years only to lose it. The problem is I am afraid to put my documents (important ones) in an unknown persoans hands (Cloud) Probably because I am not knowledgable about the concept and logistics of it. Any information would be helpful to me. Thanks... Joan
I think you are wise to be cautious about cloud storage. It's not a panacea. You can encrypt your docs before uploading them to a cloud - I know it can be done for photos but I don't know how.
The truly secure thing is to have different types of backups. A physical backup (hard drive, series of thumb drives etc) at home is convenient and will protect against your computer going haywire or spilling a drink (assuming the hard drive isn't in the same place as your computer), but not against a flood or theft. A cloud backup protects against physical damage and theft at your home, but is vulnerable to damage at the server farm, to attack on the cloud, and to the cloud's servers going haywire (cloud servers going haywire isn't common at all but it does happen on extremely rare occasions). A physical backup somewhere else isn't very convenient but will protect against damage to your home, coffee spills, theft, attacks, etc.
A thorough (or paranoid) person would use all three, a savvy person concerned with security will likely limit himself to two. Normal folk who backup use one. Many folk use none at all, and I think each and every one of them have reason to regret it.
I'm writing in a hurry so let me know if this is gobbledygook to you.
Thanks for answering my question! Our external hard drive has been acting glitchy lately (yet it's only 6 months old).
I know what you mean about housefires... For a while I was good about sending copies of all my favourite pictures to my parents for them to enjoy (but with the added benefit of knowing they had a copy I could re-access if I had to). I haven't been on top of that lately though...
I'll have to look into Cloud! Thanks for the advice...
Kristen, you should sign up for Dropbox. Free online cloud storage. I love love love my Dropbox! You can find it at http://www.Dropbox.com
For saving photos and important documents (both my husband and I are writers, and so our stories and such get back up as well) my best advice is this: research external hard drives and invest in one that is a workhorse and will last long. My husband and I have 2 fireproof safes. One was just the $20 sort with a fiddly key, but even those are large enough to hold external hard drives. Our larger coded one is where we keep everything valuable from documents to jewelry to our external hard drive. In a fire, we know we could come back and get it later (helps that I'm the daughter of a firefighter!). Our small firebox we bought originally to keep our love letters!
I love those white dress photos and all your photos. Wow what a great Mom. I was wondering did you study in college to do such a good job as a parent?
I move photos from the photo card straight away. I wonder how safe SD Cards are for storage, although I do know that with their small size they are so easy to lose. I initially copy them off the card and onto my Dropbox account to sort, there I get an immediate backup plus the ability to access them with ease from any computer in the house/work. I choose the ones I want to keep and then move them to our home server, this gets backed up to an external drive in the garage. I also have a script which emails all new photos off to a gmail account as a bit of offsite storage each day, although with file sizes for photos taken getting larger this may have the change.
We have a media centre type computer plugged into the TV which we use for watching TV, videos etc... but also browsing photos. Any new photos put on our home server are copied to this automatically and so available to view on the TV within 10 minutes or so.
The Dropbox usage is good as it really means the photos initially are in numerous physical locations but you only see it once, plus you can undelete, go back a version, if you need to while sorting/editing photos
Married to an IT guy, we too have onsite backup (at home) as well as cloud storage. We are lucky that DH's job is to evaluate all sorts of hardware and software for his employer/company so we've tried all kinds and use a few different services such as Carbonite and Mozy.
I have to say, it did save my heiny once already. I had taken a bunch of photos and wrote a bunch while on vacation with my laptop. At the airport, it was absconded while I was getting the oh-so-lovely total body scan and buh bye laptop and data. Grrrr! Thankfully, my laptop did it's usual incremental backup so as soon as I got home I was able to pull my data back down and onto my new laptop.
we also use drop box...love it! we use it for all our personal computer files and family pictures. We bought extra storage through them b/c the free amount isn't big enough for our pictures. i am a photographer, so for those pictures we keep them on an external hard drive. we also have a subscription to mozy (sp?)...which we are trying to decide if we should cancel it or not.
I upload all the "family/people" photos to Shutterfly and upload all my crafty photos to flickr.