Anne Marie, it is better to use Photo Archivable CD's to back up your images.  Fuji makes a very good product, actually one of the certificates we sent you is for a 5 pak of those cd's.  If you have not dropped by and picked them up yet, give them a try.  The difference of saving to a CD verses a DVD is space, you can only get 700 megabytes on a cd where you can get 4.7gigabytes on a DVD.  The only fear of archiving on a DVD is if it got scratched or damaged you chance loosing quite a few images.  If you choose to use a DVD to back up your images, again the ones we sell are the Fuji Archivable Type, but I would suggest you make a back up of each DVD and store them in a safe dry place.  The number of images that will fit on a DVD or CD depends on the size of the image file.  For instance if your image files are 2 megabytes each you will approximately 350 images on a CD.  James - Stan C. Reade Photo

Is there a specific CD/DVD brand that is best for burning/backing up photos?  What specs do you need to be aware of for number of pictures per CD, best quality and longivity?

I know your pain, I am currently trying to organize 4 years worth of DSLR photos. I have them spread across my laptop, home computer, server at work and backup hard drives. Everyone of them is in 2 places. 

My new process is as follows and I would like to hear everyone's backup\organization process as we are going to do a comprehensive lesson series on it.

• Download images to computer
• Give pictures a once thru, delete obvious out of focus etc.
• Back up that set of pictures to CD/DVD for Archiving
• Further organize by moving the best photos to a keepers/printable file
• Edit the keepers as I want to print/post them
• Save edited photos as PSD files for maximum edit ability
• Back up my computer drive to USB Hard Drive - minimum once a week, usually 2-3 times
• When drive space gets low delete all the non keepers from the oldest files as they are still availible on the CD/DVD

The more pictures I take the harsher sef critic I am becoming.  Unless a picture is a real keeper or has some signinficant emotial value I delete it and move on.

I seem to have discovered the biggest stumbling block in digital photography: the sheer amount of material you end up with. I have been shooting digital for several years now, but up until recently I only had a point and shoot. Since I got my SLR a few months ago the amount of pictures I have has grown, A LOT. Before the spring (got my slr when the st thomas air show happened), I had about 5000 shots at about 7 gigs.Thats all my shots since 2003. Since then I have added an additional 3000 shots, at 10GB, due to the fact the new camera is an 8MP as opposed to my old 4MP powershot.

I am curious as to how everybody else sorts, stores and archives their photos. I used to be a bit of a pack rat, but that doesnt seem to be an option these days, I use adobe photoshop album, mainly cause I have used it for years and already have a tag structure in place. Bridge appears to only allow a few color tags, while album lets me make as many as i want in a folder structure. Big downside of album is it doesn't seem to work for RAW. Any Ideas? Every time I sit at the computer, which is not very often with my schedule, I start to sort and end up just getting buried.