Sorting out the photos on your computer

I've just read an interesting article written by Jack Schofield of
The Guardian on this subject (plus some interesting replies from
a few readers of his blog)...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/askjack/2011/may/20/ask-jack-storing-photo-collection-hard-drive

Please note Schofield's Second Law of Computing as regards backing
up your photos and other info on your computer. If you don't back
your stuff up, you will lose it one day (when your laptop crashes
crashes or if it gets nicked).

I haven't yet tried the Windows Live Storage, which is an online
storage system (25GB), but this sounds good.

A member of Nottingham's Flickr Group recently reported that
his external hard drive had failed, and that he'd lost his entire
collection of photos ... hard drives can fail. A CD-Rom of mine
has just failed, with a load of family history information on it ...
it was about 10 years old, so I'm now having to get the info all
back together again.

You need more than one way of backing your stuff up, and you
have to back-up your back-ups too from time to time. Get prints
made of your favourite photos, for back-up purposes too.

WINDOWS 7 INSTALLATION

Peter Ram-Gopal gave us an excellent talk today all about installing
Windows 7, and then comparing its performance with Windows XP.

You can find out the minimum system requirements for the installation
from the Microsoft website ....

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows7/products/system-requirements

Peter recommended we all have a look at this pictorial guide
to installing Windows 7, which is very good ....

http://www.techtalkz.com/windows-7/514412-windows-7-installation-guide-tutorial.html

The 32-bit version will be more compatible than the 64-bit version
when you come to re-install your older software. However, as Peter
pointed out, the 64-bit version is more future-proof, as more and
more software is written for it, as times goes by.

Peter says that Microsoft's Extended Support for XP will end in
in 2014 on April 8th, (their Mainstream Support ended in 2009 on
April 14th.)

As regards the release date of Microsoft's Windows 8, there is a
lot of online speculation ... here is one article that JH has
found on a Google search ...

http://freshnewsdaily.com/technology-news/microsoft-windows-8-release-date-in-summer/574/

Using GIMP to change your photos

Today I ran through some of the basics of using Gimp for photo-editing,
and then did some more advanced stuff using the Free Select tool and
Layers. Everything I covered is explained in some detail in Gimp pages
1-3 on my website ~ JWebDesigns.

At the end of June, I will do another session on Gimp, to answer any
queries you might have as regards using it. Please email me with any
problem photos you have, so I can have a look at them in advance and
see if I can puzzle out how to improve them. I will bring along one
or two problem photos I've recently dealt with.

Two of the hardest things to improve are lack of sharpness in the image
and over-exposure. If you can set your camera to take RAW images, then
there is more you can do with photos with a Gimp add-on called UFRaw ...
I've written a page on this on my website with illustrations of how
useful UFRaw is.