NWA-PCUG Newsletter Article, July 2011
Are We There Yet?
Elizabeth B. Wright,
a member of the Computer Club of Oklahoma City
September 2010 issue, CCOKC eMonitor
http://www.ccokc.org
wright599new(at)sbcglobal.net (click to email author)

If you are reading this in the CCOKC eMonitor, then you are already someplace. So the question is, if we start from here, where do we want to go? Like our children on long car trips, the eternal question is: “when will we get there.” It has taken most of us “older” folks many years to get as far as the internet. But now that we are there, we aren’t that much different from the children and young adults who have the future ahead of them. Oh yes, they have their mobile devices that let them text, twitter and tune in, but that is mainly because their thumbs still work and ours don’t. As for using computers, unless they find their way into a profession which requires advanced computer skills, they will not really progress much further. And that may be a good thing. Probably the young people of today will tire of all the chatter and get on with something meaningful, but right behind them will be new generations demanding similar devices and indulgences.

So what can I offer that will lead you a step further in your computer skills? With all the help to be found online, it is hard to come up with anything profound that will be of use to you. But I must try.

Much to my disappointment I found this past week that my children are no longer interested in prints of our photographs. They want only digital images. No hard copies to clutter up their space. I can understand the need to free themselves from the storage necessary for photo albums, etc. But it seems to me that images could be lost more easily by not keeping at least one printed picture of at least some of the more important images. Obviously we now take pictures by the hundreds. Not like the “olden days” when a 12, 24 or 36 exposure roll of film could last a whole vacation. I hope I can convince either my son or my daughter to warehouse the old pictures I have, otherwise their heritage will be gone with the wind as they say. I busy scanning as many of them as I can find, but sincerely doubt if I will get all of them done.

One tip I can pass on to you is from JP Williams of the Computer Club of Oklahoma City. A long time ago he advised us to scan our pictures at the largest size we think we will ever need, something in the 8 x 10 range. And at 300 dpi at least. No matter what size the original print, let the computer do the math and interpolate (that’s a fancy word for “figure it out”) how to expand the image if it is smaller than 8 x 10. For those of you who still have not done much image scanning, it is never too late to learn. Your home scanner, if you have one that is less than five years old, should be adequate for most jobs. You need to learn about dpi and how it correlates to pixels, and also get the idea of resolution. There are professional services which can scan slides at 4000 dpi, but I don’t understand how that helps. Computer screens don’t utilize that many pixels and very few printers can print anything higher than a resolution of 300 dpi. I assume it is to have as much digital information as possible in the resulting image file. But it’s not mine to wonder why. Just be aware that there are such services if you ever choose to use them, but they don’t come cheap.

Then of course you have to transfer those digitized images to some media in addition to the hard drive in your computer. I use CDs, DVDs and USB drives for such storage, often all three for the same set of images. Since no one yet knows how durable these storage devices are, it can’t hurt to have more than one kind of backup system. Unless you make multiple backups and keep them in different locations (home, safety deposit box at the bank, a relative’s house for example), then they are also subject to the same kind of loss as paper images. Fire, flood, theft, etc. I for one do not plan to store any of my images in the “cloud” computer storage offered by so many internet related entities. Not only do I fear the loss of the internet in our lifetime, but too much chance, in my opinion, of them being hijacked.

In the past, the professionals and serious amateurs used slide film, but I have many cherished pictures from negatives so small they are almost not there. My favorite picture of the Eiffel Tower was snapped on a rainy day from the window of a moving bus. Not my picture, but one my daughter took on a high school trip to Paris. The camera was one of those strange contraptions from the 1970's when the film industry was trying everything but the kitchen sink to find new ways to take pictures. I think it had a “daisy wheel” type cartridge with the film embedded in tiny holes around the perimeter. Hopefully I will be able to recapture this image with my scanner, either the print or the negative, and hope it lasts as long as the old pictures I have of my grandparents. And I’m talking from the time of tintypes.

Happy storage days !!!

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