Download Your Images Daily

By Ken VanBree

Digital cameras are a great way to document many aspects of your construction projects. When compared to digital images, film-based images are more expensive and much more of a hassle to develop and print. But film rolls do have one advantage over digital memory cards. When a film roll has been exposed, you know it. You can't accidentally erase it and put it back in the camera.

By contrast, the flash card memory used in digital cameras is much more flexible than film rolls, but that flexibility can get you in trouble. You can accidentally erase one picture on the card or its entire contents. If you are busy shooting pictures on your construction site and you fill up the memory in your camera, you have several options. If you have another card with free space, you can put it into your camera and continue shooting. Or, you can erase selected images from any card and use the space you liberate to store additional pictures. The danger is that you may loose a shot that you really wanted.

There is nothing worse than inserting a memory card into your camera only to find that it has pictures of the kids that you forgot to download. You can choose to sacrifice those great pictures of your daughter scoring the winning run at her softball game last night, or miss the picture of a construction detail that may be useful in the future. Most people would choose the picture of their daughter.

If your camera says you have 10 images left, and you know you need to take 15 or 20, then you may be able to reduce the resolution of the remaining images in order to fit more pictures in the remaining space. Most point- and-shoot cameras allow you to set both the image size (number of pixels) and the level of JPEG compression that is applied to each image. Decreasing the image size or quality will increase the number of images you can store. For example, a 256 megabyte CompactFlash card on my Canon G3 holds 124 images in the superfine (highest quality JPEG compression) mode, 223 images in the fine mode and 444 images in the "normal" mode. But before you decide to sacrifice quality for quantity, be sure to test the various JPEG compression levels on the kinds of images you need to take. Low levels of image detail can make your pictures useless for some tasks. Be sure to choose an image setting that captures all the detail you need.

I speak from firsthand experience on this issue. When we were building our house several years ago, flash memory cards were quite expensive, so I only owned one. When I went in to shoot images before sheetrock was in- stalled, I knew that I needed more space than I had available. I could have filled up my card with images of part of the house, then gone home to download the card to my computer and come back to take more images. Since I was short on time, I chose instead to reduce the resolution of the images that I took (i.e., shoot images with fewer pixels), in order to fit more images in the space that I had. As a result, the images I do have of the wiring, framing and pipes are grainy at best, and don't even show fine details such as the wires that connect to the alarm system sensors. If I had it to do over again, I would have taken the extra time or bought an extra card.

Today's digital cameras with sensors that can capture 6, 8 or more megapixels per image can fill up a memory card quickly. The best way to ensure that you will have plenty of space in your camera is to download images the day that you take them. After you have downloaded the images, erase the card. That way you should never have to sacrifice that image of your daughter in order to get the pictures you need for your business.

July 2006 Builder Architect Edition Issue

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