Wetlook World Forum

Average picture size of 1.6 MB?

80,000/1.6 = about 50,000 pictures.

Saving to CD-ROM depends on how you want to use it, but in general you probably want to use a package like Nero. I think XP ships with some built-in CD burning software so you can just drag and drop, but I would recommend something like Nero as a simple drag-drop makes a lot of assumptions about what you want to do with the disk afterwards.

When you use CD burning software, you generally specify the type of disk: data, music, photo CD, etc. Photo CD is intended for use with a home entertainment device (such as the old Kodak photo CD viewer) and constructs the disk contents appropriately. It's a bit like the photo equivalent of making a music disk you can play on a CD player. If you create a data disk, you just use it like a floppy you can only write once - i.e. it just stores files with no specific structure other than folders as you decide to organize them. Some DVD players (my low-cost Panasonic, for example) can display jpgs burned to CD on a TV, if you follow some simple rules re: naming files and folders (explained in the player's manual).

In general, you burn a complete disk in one go. You can create multi-session disks, but they are more complicated to create and work with afterwards - I've never bothered figuring all that out. CDs are cheap and it's easy enough to organize content to fill up CDs.

Bear in mind that a CD is about 700MB - you can accommodate about 500 pictures of the size you indicated. Your 80GB HD has a capacity equal to about 100 or so CDs. Probably not practical "off-line storage" for very large collections of pictures; DVD may be better. One standard DVD = 4.7GB or 3,000 pics i.e. about 15 or so would be equivalent to the capacity of your HD. One double-layer DVD = approx 8GB or 5,000 pics or 10% of your HD.

Does this help?