Hurricane Gustav chased an estimated two million people from their homes. Fires in Southern California and Yosemite Park areas destroyed thousands of acres and burnt hundreds of homes. Floods in the Midwest swept into homes despite residents’ best efforts. Every day natural disasters take their financial and emotional toll.

In Katrina’s Path
Donna Wilsker, a long-time scrapbooker and resident of Beaumont, TX, was partially prepared when Katrina sent her and her husband, Ira, to their daughter’s home in Houston two years ago. They fled the area with as many of their valuables as they could fit in their Honda Accord, including her scrapbooks and a stack of 20 CD’s, containing the family’s complete digital photo collection.  read more »

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In the last article, I explained what online photo sites can do for you, and why you might want to use them. It's time now to get down to business: choosing the one that's right for you. What specific features should you look for? And which are most appropriate for your personal level of technical sophistication?

By and large, every one of the online photo sites accomplishes the same goal. Each lets you upload a collection of digital photos, and they make it easy (or at least it's supposed to be easy) to share them with other people. They also let you (that is, encourage you) to order prints of your photographs, and perhaps other customized items.

But, naturally, few sites stop there. Each site has its own unique features to make you choose that company instead of one of the other dozens -- perhaps hundreds -- available. Sometimes, the "extras" are the special attention they invest in making the process easy for computing novices, or maybe they're fancy tools to add bubbles or comic-book style captions to the photos. Other times, the site has unique capabilities to link your photos to other sites and to help you participate in a public community.  read more »

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Questions just keep rolling in at Verbatim’s user information site www.photostorageguide.com. General questions from people on how to gather, save, protect their family moments/memories photos and videos.

Here are answers to some of the latest questions (and answers) on archiving photos:

Q. Why are CDs and DVDs the best way to archive?

A. Since it is estimated that one out of seven computer hard drives "crash" within the first year, it could be dangerous to rely on storing irreplaceable photos on a hard drive alone. Optical discs (CD, DVD) are a very economical and reliable way to archive photos. For added security, write-once CD-Rs and DVD-Rs should be used and extra copies should be made that can be stored at another location. Users can add to the disc but cannot alter the content stored on the discs. The portability of CDs and DVDs also makes them easy to take with you in the event of an environmental disaster.  read more »

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Sarah is typical of most young women today, balancing her marketing career, running a household, and enjoying her 10-month old son, Grayson. There just doesn’t seem to be enough time to complete daily chores, let alone additional projects. However, after Jack, her husband, accidentally erased the memory card with the family’s photos of their recent trip to visit Sarah’s parents in Maine, she decided to take on the task of organizing and protecting the family’s memories.

“It wasn’t as though we had lost our entire collection, but those photos were irreplaceable,” Sarah said. “Luckily, we were able to find a software program that recovered most of the pictures from the card. Otherwise, Jack may still be sleeping on the couch.”  read more »

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