Great idea! I was just thinking that I needed to back up my photos on disk.

CDs collect dust - get a shuffle and download ALL your music and photos in it.

i agree, a million disks in cases seems crazy, considering you can just put them all on a portable external harddrive. i have my daughter's and son's life documented by week and i keep them all on my external harddrive, but i'm also considering doing mozy or something, online, so that if anything happened to my computer or harddrive, they'd be saved offsite.

We just bought a bigger external harddrive, so there was no need to delete the pictures.

In terms of organization, we created folders labelled with each year (e.g., "2009"), and within each year folders are subfolders, labeled with the following notation: year, month, date and short title (e.g., a ski trip taken on January 1, 2009 will be labeled "20090101_Ski_Trip").

Everytime, I download the pics from my camera, I use this notation. It makes it very easy to search/sort pictures later on.

Ruthi144 we use a similar system...though we have a home server so everything gets backed up there (rather than on an external hard-drive).

As for CDRs, the degrade over time and will not be readable forever. Disks take up too much space. Though...it's a "pretty" solution.

I'm a fan of folders on a harddrive that's regularly backed up and the best of them posted to Flicker in sets labled "Hanging out", "Travel", etc. I tend to lose disks.

This is a horrible and risky approach to saving digital images. CDs and DVDs are not permanent storage media. They degrade over time and have a higher rate of failure than one would expect.

External harddrive storage is great, but keep in mind that if you MOVE files to a harddrive there is only one copy. You risk a drive crash. Best approach is to keep a backup -- if this means buying two hard drives, then do it.

I use FlickrPRO (~$24/YEAR) to store all of my full res images - set them to Private if you don't want to share them. This gives me an online backup of all images. I also keep a copy on an external drive.

As a photographer, I have to say that storing images only on one CD makes me very, very nervous! In 30 years, when you want to look at those childhood photos, it's very likely there will be at least some corruption - possibly a LOT of corruption. For the curious, my system is as follows: I keep my images on a daily-backup time capsule as well as an additional external hard drive (which I back up to every few months to clear hard drive space on my primary computer). Should either of those storage media fail, I'd replace it and restore from my most recent backup. (I also have my personal images up in full-res versions on flickr.)

Obviously it's very important to me to be VERY sure my images are secure and perhaps I'm going a bit overboard, but CDs only is crazy talkin'.

I admit, I am concerned that even the above steps won't be enough to protect everything and that in 50 years I may be out of luck. For that reason, I do order prints of my very very favorite photographs and keep those around in ordered boxes - Just In Case.

I'm with the crowd on this one. I saw this article and was appalled - the folly of it all! She clearly knows from organizing, and has space, but digital files aren't film.

We have an external harddrive that backs up to a web-based server in the sky nightly, plus our selection is uploaded to Flickr for distant grandparents (and us). At the end of the year, we print a Blurb photobook of the highlights. The one thing we do not do is burn them to CD/DVD.

Imagine what she could do with all our parent's attics full of film though, eh?

We do an external hard drive as well and print photobooks every few months of the highlights. Also are going to back up onto a site. My parnter's parents house burned last year and they lost all photos-all those cute baby pics gone! Even the awesome bribe-worthy Milli Vanilli want to be pic is gone!

We have a flickr pro account I desperately need to organize. I think the twenty-four dollars a year is completely worth it.

As a professional children's photographer and someone who deals with images all the time, I would say to definitely back up some other place than just cds. I find cds/dvd to be unreliable. I would suggest also doing flash drives, ipod or an external hard drive systems (i do a double raid system for all of my files). All of these things fail so make sure to do at least two backups. :)

This is awesome! I have got to do something with all of our photos and I am so grateful that they're all available at the click of a button and not thrown in boxes upon boxes in the attic like all of the old photos at my mom's!

This is absolutely ridiculous! Is this "project" for someone who actually has time on his or her hands? Is it to satisfy some obsessive need to organize? I'm with the crowd: external hard drive and a program (I use Time Machine) to back everything up daily.

I've heard that cd's start degrading within five years... Learn how to use iPhoto or similar with key words, albums and what not. Back up on a couple of externals / servers and you should be covered. Good lord the silliness of this one!