Not all that long ago, taking pictures consisted of snapping photos on a roll of film and then taking the film to a photo lab to be developed. With the digital age came a whole new way to develop pictures. Film is not totally obsolete, but its use has rapidly declined.

The majority of people select and edit the pictures that they want to keep and print on their computers or at photo kiosks. Most people only print a select few photos and the majority are kept on the computer or shared on-line.

Digital photography allows you to see, edit and share pictures with precision and speed; the trick is to make sure any pictures you wish to save are backed up properly so those images aren't lost forever.

The most important thing you can do to preserve photographs taken with a digital camera is back up your files in multiple places in case the computer crashes or gets stolen. Photos can be lost when equipment fails and/or we accidentally delete files without having a backup.

The safest and easiest way to back up pictures is by saving copies to an external hard drive or USB flash drive. 1 or 2 terabyte drives have become very affordable allowing you to store many photos conveniently. Another option is burning your pictures to CD or DVD. The downside is that this is far more time-consuming; also, you run the risk of having your photos trapped in obsolete media if CDs someday go the way of floppy disks.

Your most important photos should be stored in a
fireproof safe or at a location outside your home.
USB flash drives are handy for that because of their compact nature.

Another alternative is to use on-line photo storage and sharing sites such as Flickr, Shutterfly, Picasa or Smugmug to name a few.

Backing up images in multiple formats is also a good idea. As you upgrade your computer and/or software, be sure you can still open digital image files with current software and on new equipment. TIFF is an uncompressed format, which means that when your digital image is saved, none of the data will be lost or compressed. JPEGs are also the standard file type if you are trying to upload photos to photo sharing sites or photo printing services. For long-term storage of your digital images, the best scenario would be to have TIFFs for your master copies: think of them as negatives and use JPEG copies for sending to a print service, sharing and posting on-line.