Re: off-topic: c: drive filling up

[Peregrine@xxxxxxxx]

Judith Davidsen writes:

≪ The problem is that these images fill up what's left of my
 C:drive. I spent 5 hours last night weeding out enough to
 free up 574mb of the 1.99gb on C:, but at the rate things
 are going the drive is going to be filled again before the
 end of the week. Getting rid of things like cookies doesn't
 make a dent. And even if I delete some of the images from
 email, Netscape 4.78 has already deposited on C: every
 single thing it delivered. ≫

STOP! I am a photographer and I understand this problem very well. Simply
stated, photographs of reasonably good quality for publication are
necessarily large. As already noted, external storage of some kind would be
the ideal solution. You have several options, none particularly cheap but
any of them justifiable expenses if this is something you'll have an ongoing
need to do.

Don't store any more images on your primary drive than absolutely necessary.
Keep them there while you are manipulating them (in Photoshop, Paint Shop
Pro, or some other image editing software), and archive them to a permanent
or semi-permanent storage medium after the manipulations are done.

A few of your options: a Zip drive (not to be confused with Zip compression
software, these drives use "floppies" that hold up to 250 MB each); a CD
burner (about 650 MB), which has the advantage of being a more stable optical
storage medium unaffected by magnetic fields you might encounter if you
carelessly laid a handful of disks atop a stereo speaker or the like; or a
simple transfer of files ASAP to a computer with more available storage space.

In my experience, a high-quality TIFF scan big enough for a full-bleed
tabloid cover would be somewhere in the neighborhood of 25-30 megabytes. It
would be imprudent to keep more than a few of these on a laptop computer with
a 2-gigabyte hard drive.

Good luck!

Jeff Seager