Jason O'Rourke wrote:

> Ron Hunter  <rphunter@charter.net> wrote:
> 
>>>>>Costco has an external 120GB Firewire/USB2 HD right now (Maxtor 7200RPM)
>>>>>for $179!
>>>>>These are great drives.  I have two of them connected to my laptop as I
> 
> 
>>>You'd be surprised what 35,000 Canon 10D/D30 RAW images can fill after
>>>they've been processed into full depth tif files...and...slide scans of
>>>50-100MB PER IMAGE add up to...
>>
>>Haven't you ever heard of compression, or the delete key, for that 
>>matter?  Of course, you could just keep buying more storage, I guess.
>>Imagine how much space those pictures would be taking up on even 35 mm film!
> 
> 
> Ron, maybe his time is worth more than your's?  He found a solution that
> costs less than $400.  So long as he has a organization that keeps track
> of all the images, it's likely to be much more cost effective to keep
> the stuff.  You could spent weeks deciding what should go or stay.  And
> compression -- why would someone who amassed 35k images think about 
> degrading them that way?  
> 
Compression using LZW with Huffman coding does not in any way degrade an 
image, it just saves a LOT of storage space.  If the pictures are stored 
in uncompressed .TIFF format, the savings can be up to 90%, depending on 
the subject matter.