Digital picture waste
October 26th, 2007 by KenricWe produce and keep so much electronic storage waste when taking digital pictures!!! I’m guilty of this but I’m getting better. I don’t know what it is but we all tend to keep things just in case. And now with memory and storage so cheap we keep tons of useless pictures just because.
Today I took some pictures while I was mountain biking in Scottsdale. I would take a picture and then take another just in case the first one was messed up. Then I took another one from a slightly different angle just in case it came out better. So now I get home and I have 3 pictures of the same thing. Do I just keep the best one? No, I move the best one to my picture folder and keep the other two just in case. In case of what??? I have no idea. So I was thinking, what if I had taken 8 pictures at that spot. I would have 7 useless pictures on my hard drive. Yet we all do this. Some people I know even keep the fuzzy ones!
Another thing I wonder about are people who take all their pictures at max. resolution. I can understand doing it for some pictures, but when you’re just snapping fun shots do you need 8,000,000 pixels? Can you even look at an 8 megapixel picture on your screen? You can probably see a half a face. Seriously, is there a chance of you printing out your picture on an 8×10? If not, use a smaller resolution. You know that when you get home you’re going to have to resize it to an emailable size. Now you have an 8 megapixel version and a smaller version. But I bet you don’t delete the smaller version from your hard drive either.
Posted in General | 5 Comments »
Stumble it!
Guilty as charged!! But I don’t do 8 Mega pixel shots. People who argue for this say they want to be able to print out their eye lash from their family reunion photo if necessary.
Since the entire purpose of my digital camera is to share photos online with others, 8 mega pixel original photos are unnecessary. But I don’t delete the smaller, resized photos. You’re right.
By Clifford on Oct 26, 2007
I often wonder about something similar. In previous generations useless knowledge and just generally dumb things were just “forgotten” because they were so unnecessary. Now the internet is a storage facility for knowledge both good and bad. Weird.
By Chuck on Oct 26, 2007
Don’t forget that one of the great benefits of giant (8 Megapixels) photos is the ability to crop and still print at a decent size. I find that the thing I enjoy the most about my 6 megapixel pics is not having to worry much about framing during shooting, I’ve always got plenty of size for cropping later.
And…at today’s HDD prices, it’s hard to justify the time spent deleting non-keepers.
By John on Oct 26, 2007
keep in mind that future screens and technologies may render your currently-perceived-as-over-the-top 8MP camera as a thumbnail.
in 1994, people were still running 640×480 screens – and scaled their pictures accordingly. which meant that those pictures are now ridiculously small and need to be re-scanned, etc.
high resolution is relative and will only continue to be so – use the limits of your gear.
don’t make the mistake of shorting yourself now and kicking yourself later.
By david whittemore on Oct 26, 2007
All good points about the 8MP size. They may have 100″ digital picture frames in the future and it’d be cool to put old pictures up on your wall.
By Kenric on Oct 26, 2007