Digital pictures becoming pixelated...

Has anyone ever had the problem of digital pics. becoming pixelated after sending them through email to someone? I sent a bunch to my son and when he opened them they were all blurry with patchy pixels. When they left here they were perfect. Problem is, they are now the only copies we have of these particular shots. Does anyone know of a way to restore them? Thanks

sometimes mail programs give you the option of resizing your pics when you send them. you may have clicked past this popup without even realizing it (if it did actually even pop up with an option).

unless you can find the originals on your computer, they're probably stuck that way.
you should always keep the originals...

eric is right. A general rule in the digital photography business is that you should treat the raw images off your camera just like you would the negatives from film - save them off immediately, somewhere easily retrievable. I shoot a lot, and I have gigabytes of "digital negatives", but I can't tell you how many times that has saved my bacon!

If you aren't doing it already, start methodically saving your "digital negatives". You won't regret it!

Yep, I even save two copies of each one of my photos: one I keep in RAW, the other I convert to .tiff or .psd (Photoshop). I convert them because I read that for archiving purposes, the RAW file format is always evolving and/or changing and you can't save it for a very long time.

As an example to this, the first digital camera I owned, the Canon Digital Rebel (EOS 300D) used the .CRW file format for RAW. The camera I now own, the Canon Digital Rebel XT (EOS 350D) uses the .CR2 file format for RAW. These are models that hit the market just 18 to 24 months apart.

As you can see, RAW is constantly on the move as each camera manufacturer tweaks White Balance, sharpness, contrast, noise reduction, etc. in their brand.

i'm a little behind in my actual archiving, but those i do have archived are pretty safe.

i make two cd-roms (verbatim archive standard). one stays at home. the other sits on the 3' raised computer room floor in my locker in my datacenter (complete with FM-200 (inert gas suppressant) and water fire supression), under floor water detection, temperature and humidity control, etc. the thick concrete walls and ceiling of the datacenter are rated to completely withstand an F4 tornado.

so, as long as i don't get fired or move to our corporate office in another position, i'm good.


edit: oh, and we're pretty sure after much deliberation a couple years back, that we're pretty impervious to zombie attack too!

I do something similar, if lower tech eric. I have two external backup drives. Each time I make a backup (and this includes all of my digital negatives), I take the new backup to work, where I store it the hard drive, and take the old one back home. So, I always have two geographically separated backups of my digital negatives (which honestly are my most treasured data). Short of the whole city being destroyed, I will always be able to recover most of my photos.

BTW, if you are not backing up somehow (CDs, DVDs, backup disks like my schema above, etc.) you don't really own your "negatives", you are just sort of borrowing them until the next crash. All computer hardware fails eventually, even Mac hardware. You should keep this in mind as you go!

Thanks Again....

This happened over the summer with my PC before it crashed and I lost a lot of Photos. I was at my son's trying to retreive what I could that i had sent him and that is when I found this batch that was pixelated. I bet I did not hit that resize button when sending.:dummy: I have always backed up on another drive, but during the crash that drive went too. I will take all of your good advice and backup to several sources. Many thanks once again....
Connie

you know another option is a site like smugmug. upload your photos there and you'll have them anywhere you go, they'll be available for your family and friends wherever they are, and you can order backup disks of your entire album.

there is a yearly fee for even the basic package, but it's worth it.

check out my site if you'd like to see what it's like:
http://hope-n-eric.smugmug.com/


(thanks to MacHeadCase for turning me into a smugmug evangelist!)

Eric Said:i make two cd-roms (verbatim archive standard). one stays at home. the othe

Eric, I have always backed up on cd-rom too.(on my PC) Recently I tried to open photos from back in "01" and the CD had somehow become corrupt. My new imac can't read it eaither. I tried to use the tool included in mac to repair it. (did not work) I know there is software you can buy for PC's to recover and repair disks. How about with Macs? Is there less chance of this happening if I back-up to DVD? Thanks.
Connie :flower:

Eric also meant that SmugMug is a hosting website for images, just like Flickr is. Why not put the photos you want your son (or anyone else in your family or your friends) to see on a website like that instead of sending them in emails?

For example, ImageShack, Photobucket, Flickr all have free accounts while SmugMug isn't a free service but has different priced packages available.

As for a corrupt CD there isn't much you can do and neither for a corrupted DVD, I'm afraid. You could always try copying the files to your desktop and see if they wouldn't work better from there instead of off of the CD, but that's a long shot, me thinks....

yeah, i've heard of data loss on some older cd-roms. duplicates are a good idea, also using a good quality brand, should help. a while back, verbatim made "archival quality" that they guaranteed would not degrade for about 100 years. now they've dropped the "archival" from their name, but i've still never had an issue.

you could also rotate disks. once you've got one that's two or three years old, copy it back to your hard drive and then burn it to a new disk. at least until something better comes along.

and no, i don't think dvd-rom is the answer. cd-rom has a more standard format, and if you accidentally ruin one or it 'goes bad', you only lose 700mb of data, not up to 4.5Gb or so.

also, as flash drives become cheaper, you may be tempted to backup to flash memory. i'd really advise agains that. why? leave one next to a good sized speaker and you'll see.