LoganFlyer

I've recently gotten into photography and have really enjoyed trying to get the shots right, playing with the settings, capturing nature and people, etc. But now that I have all these great photos, I'm curious...what do people do with them? Do they sit on the SD card gathering electronic dust? Frame them? Sell them? How do you get maximum enjoyment out of your handiwork?

eturowski

I usually just put them on Flickr/Facebook and flip through them at my leisure.

You could try your hand at Etsy if you have some time to invest in developing a shop. Their listing fees are quite reasonable ($0.20 per item for a 4-month listing, with a 3% commission on each sale or something).

BeachBum770

Depending on the subject, I may do photobooks. Since I started shooting digital, that has been a big thing for our photos. When we do vacations, I will typically create photobooks for the vacation. I have also done things like mouse pads and coffee cups for some of those special photos.

However, the majority of my photos are kept on my hard drive for me to look over at my leisure. My screen saver cycles through the My Pictures folder on my computer. It always throws up a photo I haven't seen in a while that brings back wonderful memories.

CPRich

First, you should find a hosting site to store them. If for no other reason, for disaster recovery. But it also gives you a way to share them, link to them in forums, etc. PBase, SmugMug, Flickr, Fokti, Zenfolio, etc - Google for photo hosting sites. I haven't looked in a while but there are plenty of comparison articles out there. Many of them have limited storage free options, or $30-50/yr full accounts.

I have printed a few photobooks, internally and for family gifts. Again, lots of options and many articles comparing them.

I've also printed out some of my better shots in 18x12 format, framed, and hanging around the house. Plus a couple of electronic frames around with rotating photos on the LCD panel.

The most enjoyment I have is from shooting kids' sport, local events, etc., hosting them on my SmugMug account, and pointing parents, friends, attendees at them to do what they wish. I don't try to make any money off of it - if I charged for them, I'd be neurotic in post-processing to make the best of every shot, consuming way too much time. I figure that if it's free, they can't complain.

abmj-jr

They most certainly do not stay on the SD card. I dump the cards to my laptop immediately and to the backup drive connected to my home desktop as soon as I get there. SD cards fail more frequently than hard drives, although you have to plan for HD failures, too.

As for uses, I share some with friends and family via e-mail and Facebook, sell a few as a freelance and have some of the best printed and framed on my walls. I have given a few framed prints as gifts. I had an electronic frame on my desk at work before I retired and rotated those after each major photo trip to keep it fresh.

slidergirl

I have done a few photo books from vacation trip photos. If I take a trip with friends, I'll make the books and give them as a "Thank you" for allowing us to travel together.
Some of my absolute favorites - I've had them put on canvas and hung in my house.

Theairplaneguy4ever

There are numerous Stock Photo sites out there, if you want to sell your photos. But, it's quite hard to get travel photos to sell though. Other than that you can put them on photo sharing sites and also get them critiqued by pro Photographers, which help you to capture even better images.

glennaa11

I do a couple of things. Typically I upload some to Picasaweb (Google's photo site) to share online.

Some of my favorites I print large and frame.

I have done a big month-long trip to Asia for the last several years. When I get back I make a photobook. I have used Blurb most often but have also tried Photobook America and MyPublisher. I always do the largest "coffee table" book size. They usually end up being 150-200 pages. Most of the time I go for the highest quality paper options that are offered. I enjoy flipping through them from time to time. My friends always rave about them. They're a nice way to have a collection of pictures and I add in some narrative which also ends up helping me remember the names of places visited and what happened. :-)

cubbie

I use a free program called Juggler to cycle through the photos in my photo album directory and display them as wallpaper and screen savers.

CMK10

I organize photos by trip into folders on my computer. The best of them are put on Facebook into albums based on the trip. These come complete with a witty (according to me) album title and witty captions. I take my Facebook albums very seriously and spend a few hours getting the organization, captions and framing just right. Some are also uploaded to various Flyertalk threads I participate in.

The best of them and made into prints and put on my friendship wall. Part of my bedroom has a collection of photos of me with friends, and then another that is me at various Flyertalk events.

seanman571

I'm a big fan of photo books. I've done a couple using iPhoto but I'll process them in Lightroom first. Apple's photo books turn out great and they aren't too expensive. Last one was $50 shipped for a 28 page hard cover.

LtKernelPanic

After importing them into Aperture and sorting, cataloging, and processing I'll usually put some of my favorites on flickr. I don't print a lot but if something really jumps out at me I may print it. I'll often sync my most recent shots to my iPad and use it as a digital album to show others and for my own enjoyment.

WillCAD

The first step to using your pics, in any way, for any purpose, is to have them well organized on your computer. Get them off of the memory cards and onto your hard drive, and come up with a folder structure, and a naming convention, that will allow you to find specific photos when you want them. Make sure your naming system and folder structure leave plenty of room for expansion.

My folder system is strictly chronological. I have a folder for each year. Under those folders, I have a folder for each day I take photos; each year will have a maximum of 365 subfolders. If you take pics every day, you can add in subfolders for each month, so you won't have so many Daily folders in the list when you're looking at your pics. Example: Today's pics would be stored under My Photos\2012\2012-10-03\ If I were to add month folders, it would look like this: My Photos\2012\10-October\2012-10-03\

My pics are named simply, with the date, an underscore, and a 3-digit number. Example: the first pic I take today would be called 2012-10-03_001.jpg.

As you can see, I use a YYYY-MM-DD date format in my file names. This makes files names sort chronologically. And if I were to add a Month subfolder, I would include the number of the month at the beginning of the folder name, so the month folders would also sort chronologically.

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Once you have your pics gathered into one folder tree and organized to your taste, you can easily back them up to CD/DVD, flash drive, portable hard drive, or any other media you choose. You can also easily upload them to whatever online photo sharing service, or backup service, or cloud storage service, that you choose, and keep the same organization system.

Consistency is key. If your photos folder is on D: drive on your desktop computer, it should be in the same spot on D: drive on your laptop. This allows you to keep your photo folders easily in sync, because they're in exactly the same spot on all of your computers. And if you have an external hard drive, using the same structure on that drive as well will allow you easily sync it with your computers. This can automate your backups, using any sort of backup software you choose.

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And when all of that is done, I view my pics all the time via a slideshow screensaver on my computer. When I'm not using the computer, it shows a constant slideshow of my pics. I simply change the settings now and then to limit the pics to specific years, or weeks, or days, as my mood changes. Since I started doing this, I see my older pics now much more often than in the film days when they were all buried in albums!

longwaybackhome

I keep mine on my memory card and download them to my computer. If I really like a shot, I print it and hang it up. I have two pictures of Barcelona and one of Montreal on my wall.

ace26

Speaking as a professional photographer regarding storage/organization...

Simply keeping images on a computer is too risky and it would fill up too fast (psd files easily get up to 40MB each). In fact, I store nothing on my computer - rather I keep files on a portable hard drive which I can carry with me and use with any computer (I fill up a 500GB LaCie drive every 7-8 months). I also back up each hard drive completely to another hard drive every so often and upload select images to a cloud server. It's important to spread things out and have multiple copies so even losing an entire hard drive is no big deal because I've backed it up.

I use Lightroom to catalog and keyword images, and start a new catalog with each new hard drive. Naming every image sequentially is useless because I shoot so many images it would be impossible to track down a shot later if it only had a number. With Lightroom, I create collections and add keywords so it takes seconds to find an image by search. Plus, Lightroom saves the edit history for every image on one master file so I can go from computer to computer and still have an updated catalog.