#5 If you don’t have the CD/DVD or Thumb drive with you, you can’t show or use your images.
The burden of getting your images in a format and a place where you can use them and easily share them is up to you. Your photographer may hand you a CD as part of your portrait package, but often we just don’t know what to do with the CD. How do you take large files and format them for facebook galleries? What if I want to print out a 5X7 of a 15Mb file? How can I get them on my mobile phone, so that I can share them with my friends and family? Your photographer may be generous enough to provide, not only the high resolution digital files, but they may also provide you with web ready images. Again, you still need to take the images from the CD/DVD or Thumb drive format and get them to your gallery or place to post. It’s an added step, that most of us just don’t have time or the complete knowhow to accomplish. So the CD sits in a desk drawer, the thumb drive of our beautiful wedding images languishes in the cute branded box that it came in.
#4 Thumb drives can be easily misplaced/lost
Let’s be honest, thumb drives are small things. I’ve misplaced several in my years(data and files on the lost drives were backed up, so nothing lost), I’ve even run one through the wash, completely by accident. But they don’t do well in the spin cycle and my data was gone. I know that often times we want to have something to hold in our hands, but something as tiny as the flash drives they are making today is easily lost.
#3 Most computers being built today don’t even come with CD/DVD drives.
Apple has made the switch to providing online downloads of their favorite software and OS(just take a look at the App Store). Most software companies charge an extra fee just to ship you a CD of the software that you purchased online. The cloud has gained in popularity and ease of use. Plus, you can access the cloud from just about anywhere, a CD you need to have with you to use.
#2 CD/DVDs get scratched and eventually data becomes corrupted, meaning your photos are history.
CD/DVDs and thumb drives are physical media, meaning they can be susceptible to physical damage. A scratch in the wrong place on a CD will render your precious portraits unreadable and essentially lost. A thumb drive dropped on a hard floor can cause the data on it to become corrupted as well. Archival CD/DVDs can last for 100 years, however will a CD/DVD player be around for your grandkids to access your pictures. Who know’s how long the CD or even the thumb drive storage format will be around. Like in the years past when we began to copy family movies from super8, to VHS, to CD/DVD. What will be the next format we will have to convert our files to just to continue to view and enjoy them?
#1 You can’t easily share your images with your friends and family.
Unless they are at your computer, or YOU have taken the time to place them in galleries on your mobile device or tablet, chances are you won’t share many of your images. After you have taken the time to upload them to facebook and create your own gallery of images it is easier to share them. But most of us would rather not have that extra step, just so we can show off our professionally captured images.
