Travel photography

My intention is to post here every other day, but I missed yesterday.  That's partly because I've gotten a little behind in my blog drafts, but a lot of it has to do with the chaos that was created late yesterday when we discovered that some of the pictures that we have saved on CDs were irretrievable.  So, while this post isn't exactly about travel, it is travel related.

I shouldn't say completely irretrievable, because in the end, we were able to get most of them back.  We did have a few casualties, though.  Fortunately, these were relatively limited.  However, it made me a little nervous about the rest of our photos.

Back in the day, you went around with film and camera, and took whatever shots you took, hoping desperately that your pictures would come out okay, and at the end of a trip, you took your film in to the store, paid an exorbitantly high price to get them developed, and then you could finally look through and see what you got.  That often led to interesting discoveries - reference prior Jamaica posts for an example.  Since pictures were limited based on the cost of film development, you chose your shots more carefully - our first trip to Ireland, I think we took slightly over 100 pictures in about a week. The more recent trips we've taken, we've probably taken 100 to 150 pictures a day.  (To be clear, it's IrishFrog who is the shutterbug, not me.)

With the advent of the digital camera, things changed immensely.  At first, you bought multiple storage cards to handle the increased volume of pictures that you were taking.  Now, even that isn't a necessity.  I do think that we brought two storage cards on our last visit to Europe, but that was partly because we knew we wouldn't be removing pictures from them until we got home.  So, originally you just transferred your pictures to the computer, and that was it.

Enter the failure of computer drives, and the need to find another, more reliable place to store digital photos.  I've had one computer crash on me, and although I was able to recover some files, much of what was on there was lost.  Since that time, IrishFrog has been fairly diligent in backing up the photos to CD.  We now have over a decade worth of pictures stored on CD - and as computers have come and go through our house, we've backed up, checked to make sure they work on other computers, and filed them away in a giant CD holder.

Until now.  As I mentioned, yesterday, we tried to open a couple of the disks only to find that not all of the photos were accessible.  We already have an external hard drive which I'll be using to transfer the photos to a safer place, but I'm also looking at online storage as another option.  I'll let you know what I find out next time.