[Chris Campbell]

I spent a morning last week wading through 15 years worth of slides of my work to edit them down to 200 or so. ( Phew, I sure went through a lot of clay!!!!!!! A real trip down memory lane to a time when every show needed slides for submission and don't you dare even think about digital.)

So ... I have a couple hundred slides and will be editing them down again to a cohesive time line for presentations.
Here's my question ... to what technology should I change them and how?
I am a bit daunted by the fact that five years ago I would have put them on floppys and today I would still need to do it again.

Ideas?

[Marcia Selsor]

I have a Nikon Super Cool Scan 5000 digitizer I have been using for a long time. I must have 10,000 slides from 30+ years of teaching. It is a great slide scanner. Slow but can make a great image from a dark obscure slide. These from years of poor photo skills.I have digitized slides from many travels, student work, 40 years of NCECA shows, research on potters, and Ceramic Art History as well as old work. OS 10 doesn't support it so I use my old Mac now. I would look into a digitizer with all the bells and whistles that reduce red and yellowed slides, scratches and dust. I store them on my hard drive and back up.

Check on ebay to see what is new on the market.
Marcia

[Mark C.]

Chris
Floppy to zip discs to CDs and what will be the next?
No media stays for long

I think the CD has held up the longest
I have a nikon super cool slide scanner (5000) with a 50 tray holder and put mine on a hard drive-then you can burn a CD or whatever comes along
I would keep the slides as backup. I have about 20,ooo. mostly underwater shots.
You can manage them with a program like Lightroom. I say this as I own this but yet to have do a thing with it. Maybe when I'm slowing down later in life.
A good scanner will do you the most good. See whats out there-B&H photo may be the best deal
Mark

[JBaymore]

Chris,

I have a HP PhotoSmart S20 slide scanner (no longer made unfortunately). Was great features for the price at the time a number of years ago. Goes to 2400 dpi resolution. Slow, but good images.

There are places that will do this in bulk for you (for a fee of course).

I too have a gazillion slides from 40+ years of claywork and 35 of teaching. Pain in the butt. Working through them slowly.

best,

.......................john

[GEP]

Chris, buy a 500GB external hard drive with a USB plug. They are about $75 these days. USB ports are very common and universal, you should be able to use it for many many years. Even when USB goes obsolete, USB devices are so common there will surely be an adapter to connect it to whatever new computer you have then.

I have all of my photos from 2003 to present on my 500GB drive, and I have only used 1/10 of the storage space!

Mea

[bciskepottery]

It's not just the medium for storing for the future (CDs, DVDs, portable hard drives), you also need to think about the file format you are going convert the slide to . . . jpegs, raw, etc.

[Christine]

bciskepottery, on 16 July 2012 - 05:36 PM, said:

It's not just the medium for storing for the future (CDs, DVDs, portable hard drives), you also need to think about the file format you are going convert the slide to . . . jpegs, raw, etc.

jpg. every time for me as they'll open in Photoshop for tidying and then saved again as .jpg - seems a pretty univeral format

Christine

[Pres]

Christine, on 16 July 2012 - 04:05 PM, said:

bciskepottery, on 16 July 2012 - 05:36 PM, said:

It's not just the medium for storing for the future (CDs, DVDs, portable hard drives), you also need to think about the file format you are going convert the slide to . . . jpegs, raw, etc.

jpg. every time for me as they'll open in Photoshop for tidying and then saved again as .jpg - seems a pretty univeral format

Christine

I always back up digital images on CD, all sorts of hard drives crash. At the same time, I have over the years found that I prefer a TIFF format for most of my saves. It is larger in file size than the JPG, but then it is not a lossy format. Your jpg file degrades each time you edit it. Over time this will amount to slight changes in color that were not there, reflections or details missing and other small changes that I really don't want to happen. A TIFF can always be saved as a JPEG for posting etc, but in the end I will stick with TIFF for archival imagery.

[DAY]

Too often the detritus of our past clogs our present. Is there a pressing reason to convert old stuff into new media?


And what to do with past excursions into lands that turned out to be less than fertile. Pots "too good to throw away." Boxes of rocks and clothing and memories that seemed important when we packed them up and moved them yet again to a bigger place. Oooh!It has a barn! And outbuildings. I always wanted to try blacksmithing/glassblowing/weaving.

Also my many unfinished/ unpublished novels, too often rejected by the '80's, but maybe, with a touch of newfound insight, tempt a next generation publisher. Or my agent's daughter! Leave them on yellowing pin-printed paper, or find a way to convert those floppies into digital? Oh, fuggedaboutit; live for today, for tomorrow. Greet the semester's new students with new insight.
I have at least a century's worth of stuff, and I am only in my seventies.

[GEP]

Pres, on 16 July 2012 - 08:00 PM, said:

Christine, on 16 July 2012 - 04:05 PM, said:

bciskepottery, on 16 July 2012 - 05:36 PM, said:

It's not just the medium for storing for the future (CDs, DVDs, portable hard drives), you also need to think about the file format you are going convert the slide to . . . jpegs, raw, etc.

jpg. every time for me as they'll open in Photoshop for tidying and then saved again as .jpg - seems a pretty univeral format

Christine

I always back up digital images on CD, all sorts of hard drives crash. At the same time, I have over the years found that I prefer a TIFF format for most of my saves. It is larger in file size than the JPG, but then it is not a lossy format. Your jpg file degrades each time you edit it. Over time this will amount to slight changes in color that were not there, reflections or details missing and other small changes that I really don't want to happen. A TIFF can always be saved as a JPEG for posting etc, but in the end I will stick with TIFF for archival imagery.

A lot of new computers do not have CD drives anymore. They are too big for how slim and small computers have become. CDs are going to disappear just like floppies and zip disks. In my years as a graphic designer I had far more problems with CDs gone bad than with hard drives and flash drives. I could also go on a designer's rant about JPG vs. TiF but most of it is not relevant to pottery photographs. The bottom line is both are fine for editing/saving/storing your pottery photos.

Hey if you want to go newfangled, you could use "cloud" storage, which means to store your data somewhere online with a service that promises to keep it safe. I don't know much about it beyond that, maybe somebody else here does.

Mea

[JBaymore]

GEP, on 16 July 2012 - 08:40 PM, said:

Hey if you want to go newfangled, you could use "cloud" storage, which means to store your data somewhere online with a service that promises to keep it safe. I don't know much about it beyond that, maybe somebody else here does.

If the major financial instuitutions can't keep THEIR sensitive data safe from hacking ....... why in the H%$$ would anyone want to deliberately store their data "in the cloud"? Until security issues are fully solved (likely never....the bad guys are always one step ahead of the good guys) that just seems like a totally bad idea to me. I'm much rather keep important stuff on a RAID 0 array of local hard drives. Hard drives are cheap storage these days.

best,

................john

[Mark C.]

GEP has it right
I have a long time friend who is a nationally known photographer who has all his images on 4 hard drives as backup in the banks safe deposit.
This discussion brought out my memory on this-He has a walk in vault at home thats fire proof that used to hold all the 4x5 images and well as a few zillion slides
He at his heyday had two full time employees selling images now with the photos basically free from places like Getty images he has fallen on tougher times.
as far as shooting raw files is the way and sell them as JPEGs store them raw or tiffs-I have not ever mentioned this on the clay board but also have sold a fair amount of underwater images a few articles -usually a few images a year-I used to sell a lot on images to underwater calenders.
Heres a few samples-You see Clay is not my only passion.
Mark

[GEP]

JBaymore, on 16 July 2012 - 11:36 PM, said:

GEP, on 16 July 2012 - 08:40 PM, said:

Hey if you want to go newfangled, you could use "cloud" storage, which means to store your data somewhere online with a service that promises to keep it safe. I don't know much about it beyond that, maybe somebody else here does.

If the major financial instuitutions can't keep THEIR sensitive data safe from hacking ....... why in the H%$$ would anyone want to deliberately store their data "in the cloud"? Until security issues are fully solved (likely never....the bad guys are always one step ahead of the good guys) that just seems like a totally bad idea to me. I'm much rather keep important stuff on a RAID 0 array of local hard drives. Hard drives are cheap storage these days.

best,

................john

Yeah, I have trust issues with storing my work that way too. But mostly I won't do it because I'm cheap :-). Once you give someone your data, I feel like they could charge you whatever they wanted by using your data as a hostage.

RAID array of hard drives ... my inner computer nerd says "cool!"

Mea

[Pres]

GEP, on 17 July 2012 - 07:45 AM, said:

JBaymore, on 16 July 2012 - 11:36 PM, said:

GEP, on 16 July 2012 - 08:40 PM, said:

Hey if you want to go newfangled, you could use "cloud" storage, which means to store your data somewhere online with a service that promises to keep it safe. I don't know much about it beyond that, maybe somebody else here does.

If the major financial instuitutions can't keep THEIR sensitive data safe from hacking ....... why in the H%$ would anyone want to deliberately store their data "in the cloud"? Until security issues are fully solved (likely never....the bad guys are always one step ahead of the good guys) that just seems like a totally bad idea to me. I'm much rather keep important stuff on a RAID 0 array of local hard drives. Hard drives are cheap storage these days.

best,

................john

Yeah, I have trust issues with storing my work that way too. But mostly I won't do it because I'm cheap :-). Once you give someone your data, I feel like they could charge you whatever they wanted by using your data as a hostage.

RAID array of hard drives ... my inner computer nerd says "cool!"

Mea

Just finished a new computer build based around a 3930K processor, and a SSD operating drive with a 1TB hard drive. Am going to reconfigure the operating drive as a Raid 0 for better control of data. I still build with CD,s, and don't foresee another hard copy to take its place anytime soon. Hard drives are pretty dependable, but great numbers of images take a lot of hard drive space. When I include, family, travel, paintings, pots, and other art work including animations It is boggling. As to the value of the past images, they help me chart where i have been and where I want to be. All too often an old travel image ends up as a thumbnail for a painting or as a texture on a pot.

[Chris Campbell]

"Too often the detritus of our past clogs our present. Is there a pressing reason to convert old stuff into new media?"

Absolutely right DAY.
My slide sorting adventures occurred halfway through a crazed "I have to get rid of all this cr-p we have accumulated in this house for the past 20 years" binge I was on. We now have an entire truckload for Goodwill, four carloads gone to Best Buy to recycle electronic stuff and eight to the paper recycling. Phew ...

But during the task of sorting thousands of slides down to 200 or so .... here's I found ....
- I moved tons and tons of clay ... yes, I used to buy it 2,000 lbs at a time and more than once per year.
- I went through distinct phases that I never saw so clearly at the time.
- I made some lovely raku before I stopped and sold all the equipment.
- I made competent functional wares before I stopped and sold all the glaze ingredients.
- I remembered why I know about colored porcelain ... how about 10 years producing about 4,000 - 6,000 colored clay ornaments per year ... until my market disappeared.
- A couple or more times I came across something I totally forgot that I used to make.
- Old booth shots and craft shows shots reminded me why I don't do that anymore.
- finally ... yes ... some of the stuff was B A D ... in retrospect, what was I thinking!!!

In the end though I will convert about 40 - 60 of the slides that show my phases for a presentation and for my website. I know I really love seeing the presentations that show that lifetime trip of an artist and hope to be able to share it with others ... well, yeah ... maybe I'll invite unsuspecting guests for dinner and surprise them with an after dinner show.

[Rebel_Rocker]

Just read through most of the posts...

Everyone seems to have different ideas on storage.

I think CD's are a pretty safe way to go. Yes 'CD' format is growing a bit old BUT all DVD's and now the new tech Blue Rays can read CD's. So I don't think it's going out of style any time soon.
DVD and Blu Ray are just larger storage formats (still basically the same tech, it's not like going from vinyl to cassette to CD).

But, DVD is super common now and you can put 10x as much on one so there's not a lot of reason to go CD.

Raw format is a bit overkill imo. Sure it's great if you are a professional photog and want to always have the best possible photo to edit, but the file size is 10x a jpg. Tiff is apple format, Bitmap is PC format... basically both the same thing, less loss of data than jpg. But Jpg is fine for photos, as stated though every time you save they break down more. But if you always work from the source each time then you wont ever get to the point they really lose enough quality to tell.

And if the images are for a website, they will get compressed so much that even a bad jpeg would still work fine. (but once it's in web format it's never good for anything else... I spent years in a sign shop and people always wanted us to use a 1" x1" web pic for a 20+" vehicle logo... just doesn't work that way)