I am a medical professional who takes thousands of pictures per year and would like to switch to a digital fromat. However, I have had major difficulty deciding on which storage medium to use for archiving (CD, hard drive, Zip, Jaz etc.) and which program to use for managing the information. Any thoughts would be appreciated.

-- Kevin Shumrick (shumrika@ucmail.edu), July 22, 1998

Answers

For long-term archive, you absolutely can't beat writeable CD. - I've seen blanks selling for as little as $0.59! (For 650 megabytes!)If you're truly archiving (eg, don't need to make changes), I really don't think you could go wrong with CDs. Buy a BIG hard drive (they're cheap now), and just pile up images in a partition until you have enough to fill a CD. Hard drives are cheap enough you could afford to have several partitions to hold different categories. (Of course, depending on quantities of data, and how frequently/quickly you need to access it, multiple big hard drives may not be a bad solution.) (For maybe $300 for an 8 gigabyte IDE drive, you can store a LOT of stuff.)

Organization software is a much tougher call. For ease of use, I like Fetch by Extensis. For flexibility, ImageAXS Pro by Digital Arts & Sciences is hard to beat. I think DAS has a specialized version out now aimed directly at medical applications. I also think the DAS products would scale better to truly large databases.

-- Dave Etchells (detchells@imaging-resource.com), July 23, 1998.