101 QUICK AND EASY SECRETS FOR USING YOUR DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHS- P4:Millions of people around the world have many photos stored on their laptop and desktop computers, external hard drives, CDs and DVDs, and flash drives. Most images are just sitting there idle, waiting for the world to see them. Some have been unused for years. Up until now there has been no guide to help people find ways to use these photos. | Chapter 1 Preparing Your Photos for Use I To easily access your photos in different programs you ll need to make sure your computer is running efficiently. You don t want to wait for nearly a minute for a photograph to open in Photoshop nor do you want the programs that process your photos to make your computer crash. There are a few simple things you can do to make your computer run efficiently so that you can access your image files without having to tap your foot waiting for them to come up. 2 Preparing Your Photos for Use Maintaining Your Computer so You Don t Lose Image Files On a Mac if your computer gets sluggish the first thing you can do is repair disk permissions. To get to the Repair Permissions dialog box choose Macintosh HD Applications Utilities Disk Utility. Then click on Macintosh HD in the menu on the left side of the window. Finally click on the Repair Disk Permissions button at the bottom of the window. There s no need to verify disk permissions. Figure shows what you ll see. Figure Disk Permissions dialog box. On a PC running Windows Vista you have an upgraded system maintenance from other Windows versions. You get a report about how your computer is functioning by navigating to Control Panel System Maintenance Performance Information and Tools see Figure . To improve your machine s score you can use the Disk Defragmenter and Disk Cleanup Control Panel System and Maintenance . Preparing Your Photos for Use 3 Figure Windows Vista gives you a report on how your system is functioning. WHAT WILL YOUR IMAGES LOOK LIKE IN 10 YEARS A good question to ask yourself is Where will my images be in 10 years Most cameras produce compressed files known as JPEG JPEG files are compressed data is lost. The most important drawback of keeping your images in JPEG format is that if you open them and then edit and save them your image will lose quality If you repeat this process many times you ll end up with an image of very poor .
