Preserve Your Personal Heritage: Best Practices

• –Digital camera?
• –Computer hard drive?
• –Flash drive?
• –Website?
• –Memory card?

Identify which images are most important to you:

• You can pick as many or as few as you like
• If there are multiple copies of an image, always save the image with the highest quality (i.e. pixels, dpi, JPEG, TIFF…) (Check out the TIFF/JPEG page to learn more!)

• –Assign descriptive file names to individual photos
• –Tag photos with names of people and descriptive subjects
• –Create a directory/folder on your computer to put your photos
• You can add metadata to you images through simply adding descriptive titles to your folders and files or...
• You can purchase programs such as Adobe Photoshop Lightroom and Aperture by Apple to add more descriptive metadata described in the Metadata Resources Tab of this LibGuide
• There are also programs you can download for free such as FastStone Image Viewer, Zoner Photo Studio Free, and XNView to add more descriptive metadata to you images
• The more metadata you add to your images the better off they are

Check out the other sections in this LibGuide for more information regarding the preservation of your social media photos, adding metadata to your photos, and storing your photos for long-term!

For more information about digital photographs preservation best practices check out the Library of Congress's website.