The majority of mine are taken at a non-profit organization for their use in whatever they feel necessary, website, brochures, etc....my personal pictures are either flickr'd or just emailed to family/friends; although recently, my wife got my foot in the door to have a couple really good ones donated for an auction..i have a print at her office and one for her boss' wife, but yeah, they just pile up in my 'pictures' folder on my hard drive...i like to flip thru them in picasa every once and again...

[SuperAkuma]

There are many ways to show your work for free or at little cost. Flickr is a nice place to display your work for free and have other add comments about your photos. You have a limit of 100mb per/month on the free account. If you are not using that as an online storage place, you shrink the image and store hundreds of photos each month without paying a penny. What I really like about flickr is the online community. Most of them are photo enthusiast who like taking photos for the simple joy of taking photo.

I also use smugmug to display my pictures and as an online storage. It is not free but I like the layout better. There is a lot that you can customize on smugmug and you can also lock a gallery as well if you don't want people to see.

Another thing that I do is post photos on this board and other photo board to share with other. I personally think that we should share the photos that we taken with our camera. I never understood the reason why people print there image, leave them in a shoe box and hide them from the world.

[LeoTaylor]

I use them as screensavers with a twist. If I put them all in one folder they would be unmanageable but XP Pro accepts only one folder. So I group them by subject (our home in Connecticut, Vermont, New York, Canada, Parades, Animals, Dog Park, and so on). I use a DOS script to rename the folders on boot (I don't copy data, just change the folder names). That way each boot I have a new subject. Currently I have 16 folders and 1630 JPEGs so it is a couple of weeks before a folder repeats.

Sometimes when I'm chatting on the phone I watch that days screensaver cycle by...

[Marc Sabatella]

I'm actully pretty organized. Most of my ideas come from Peter Krogh's "The DAM Book", but I've adapted them considerably for my own purposes.

- All pictures go into folders organized by day shot only
- All pictures get tagged with keywords & other metadata to help me find them later
- All pictures get ratings (1 - 5). This serves many purposes, but the main one is to differentiate the "keepers" (3 and above) from the ones I'll file away and most likely never look at again
- The "keepers" may get some PP, the others likely won't (except maybe to batch apply WB or exposure adjustment).
- The "keepers" then get "proofs" generated - medium reoslution (1200x1800) JPEG copies that live in date-organized folders on my laptop hard drive. The idea is to keep the number and size of the proofs down to the point where I can reasonable expect to hold *all* of them on my laptop - and by "all", I mean, all the proofs I expect to generate in my lifetime I want to have on my laptop. That's actually quite reasonable - my current laptop already has room for many years of proofs, and before it fills, I expect to have a laptop with a larger capacity drive. That's how it always works,
- After generating proofs, the originals go to an external hard drive and are also backed up to DVD and are rarely seen again except when I want to print big or revisit some PP decisions later down the road.

During this process, I get to spend a decent amount of time with my pictures, and I feel I "know" them a whole lot better than if I just filed them away and forgot about them. Immediately after processing a bunch of pictures in this way, I'll often upload a few to my sites on Flickr, Zenfolo, or Facebook. I *might* print one or two, but it's not very likely. I generally get to keep seeing these pictures pretyt often, either when I visit my own web sites, or when just browsing through my proofs, which I do reasonably often. Sometimes I browse for a specific reason ("I feel like looking at my beach pictures today" or "my brother wants to me to send him all the pictures I have of his daughter"), sometimes more randomly. I use the keywords and other metadata I entered earlier to help me find the pictures I am interested in.

[HGMonaro]

I never understood the reason why people print there image, leave them in a shoe box and hide them from the world.

There's a number of reasons they end up in a shoe box, but as many people will see them there as on a computer. So much is being uploaded these days it's ignored anyway. I enjoy sitting down with my boxes of prints or albums and leafing through them. Some people like leafing thru photo's, just like reading a book on paper as opposed to on some electronic device.

Last weekend I was leafing through 100+ year old postcards (mostly sent to distant relatives before and during WWI). The scenes on the cards were interesting and what writing I could read (people didn't 'print' back then but wrote in 'script' which I couldn't read a lot of) was also intriguing. What those people were thinking of back them, news of the day, etc. Won't get any of that with files on the computer. Lots of people use to do the same with photos by writing on the back. Ask a granny who was in a photo or where it was and they turn it over to check!

Having said that, I don't print much digital but tend to copy stuff to a USB key and have 'slide shows' on our TV, but we used to do that with a slide projector too. My wife scrap-books and we review those on occasion. I'm also working on some photo-books (Blurb, etc) of holidays to incorporate the photos with our travel diaries.

Nige.

[Canada_Rockies]

This year as a Christmas mail out to friends and relatives, I printed calendars through Shutterfly. This image was the top 16x11 inches of at 16x20 poster style full year 2009 calendar.

[annod]

thanks for all the great ideas.

Another problem I had when i was using the digicam was that my picture-taking has gotten really sloppy.

Today, I am using manual focus prime lens on my K10D. I am slowing down By taking time to see the subject, and carefully compose a shot, I feel that I am also building a stronger connection with the subject. This longer process reminds me why I liked photography. And even if I don't get a great shot, I still enjoy it because the process is as important to me as the results.

Also, I started taking RAW pics, because of the file size, I am heavily editing my shots once they are on my computer too. So that's good.

Quality over quantity...that's one of my new year resolution.

-donna

P.S.Speaking of sharing photos, here is one i took tonight (ISO 1600, handheld):

Attached Images

 

[Mike Cash]

Some I print out and give to the people that are in the photos. Some I do for a dance group and provide them the photos on a disc. Some I post to Flickr (mostly as a host so I can then post them here). And some I post in a one-a-day photoblog. I have to admit that at first it was damned hard to come up with one photo a day worth showing to anybody. But at the moment I am pre-posted pretty much through the end of April and part of the way into May.

[Kerrowdown]

Sell as many as I can and any really stunning images hang on my own wall.

[RichardS]

I'm actully pretty organized. Most of my ideas come from Peter Krogh's "The DAM Book", but I've adapted them considerably for my own purposes.

<snip>

Thanks for the post, Marc. I've saved it in my hints and tips file. That's a keeper

[RichardS]

Last weekend I was leafing through 100+ year old postcards (mostly sent to distant relatives before and during WWI). The scenes on the cards were interesting and what writing I could read (people didn't 'print' back then but wrote in 'script' which I couldn't read a lot of) was also intriguing. What those people were thinking of back them, news of the day, etc. Won't get any of that with files on the computer. Lots of people use to do the same with photos by writing on the back. Ask a granny who was in a photo or where it was and they turn it over to check!

Nige.

That's so true. My wife's aunt (English) died a year or so ago. Late last year one of her friends (a youngster in her mid 80s ) flew out to Australia and brought the aunt's photo albums with her. There were photos going back to the 1880s. Many of them had notes on the back. My Mil (94) and the younger members of the family spent hours over the Christmas holiday going through the photos and checking out who was who. There will be many more hours spent.

One larger (10" by 6" ?) photo caught my notice. 12 RAF officers, Group Captain and above, with many of the people identified by the writing on the back. All were Battle of Britain pilots, including my wife's father. One was Al Deere who managed to get shot down 7 times, but still survived. Alan Christopher Deere - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. They were the official pall bearers at Winston Churchill's funeral. This was a historical document!

So write your notes on the back of your photos or enter the data into your computer. You might have a historical photo on your hands :-)

Richard.

[whatever7]

I dump everything on the web. My flickr ac**** has 11k photos.

I might get a picasa account as backup, besides my harddrive.

[Wombat]

thanks for all the great ideas.

Another problem I had when i was using the digicam was that my picture-taking has gotten really sloppy.

Today, I am using manual focus prime lens on my K10D. I am slowing down By taking time to see the subject, and carefully compose a shot, I feel that I am also building a stronger connection with the subject. This longer process reminds me why I liked photography. And even if I don't get a great shot, I still enjoy it because the process is as important to me as the results.

Also, I started taking RAW pics, because of the file size, I am heavily editing my shots once they are on my computer too. So that's good.

Quality over quantity...that's one of my new year resolution.

-donna

In a way, this insight you've had answers the question I was going to put to you, namely, why do you take photographs? Often the reason people spend time with a camera inspires what they do with the results. In your case you seem to enjoy the process as much as the end results, so you may find yourself printing off only the very best of your efforts, perhaps as evidence of the development of your skills. For the rest I think Marc has set out an exemplary method of taking care of the rest. There are other options to consider, too, such as entering some photos in a local art exhibition, offering some prints to your local library for displays on particular themes, working with a poet or writer to produce a coffee table book, offering your services to a volunteer group who need inspiring images for flyers and posters etc.

Like most people here, I have far too many mediocre shots hanging about on my hard drives and it's time for a big cleanout!

[NicholasN]

I have a file library of External drives, 2 so far both 250GB each.

My latest external drive is 500GB and will take a while to become full but once they are done they are stored in a Safe with silica gel packs to stop any long term moisture damage to the hard drives.

If I ever need an image it's as simple as plugging the drive in.

[PNTXFTW12]

I still think that a photo is best appreciated after its printed out into the physical world :]
That's why I'm getting a PixmaPro 9000 soon, woohoo!