Keeping Personal Digital Photographs

Photos have rich personal meaning. And photos are unique: if they are lost, the information they provide can never be replaced.

• How to Transfer Photos from Your Camera to Your Computer (PDF, 213 Kb)

VIDEO: Phil Michel, Digital Conversion Coordinator from the Library of Congress's Prints & Photographs division, offers advice on archiving digital photos.

Archiving Tips

Identify where you have digital photos

• Identify all your digital photos on cameras, computers and removable media such as memory cards.
• Include your photos on the Web.

Decide which photos are most important

• Pick the images you feel are especially important.
• You can pick a few photos or many.
• If there are multiple versions of an important photo, save the one with highest quality.

Organize the selected photos

• Give individual photos descriptive file names.
• Tag photos with names of people and descriptive subjects .
• Create a directory/folder structure on your computer to put the images you picked.
• Write a brief description of the directory structure and the photos.

Make copies and store them in different places

• Make at least two copies of your selected photos—more copies are better.
• One copy can stay on your computer or laptop; put other copies on separate media such as DVDs, CDs, portable hard drives, thumb drives or Internet storage.
• Store copies in different locations that are as physically far apart as practical. If disaster strikes one location, your photographs in the other place should be safe.
• Put a copy of the photo inventory with your important papers in a secure location.
• Check your photos at least once a year to make sure you can read them.
• Create new media copies every five years or when necessary to avoid data loss.

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