CEDAR FALLS - Ask Mike Walden of Walden Photo in Cedar Falls to tell you the horror stories. A wedding photographer who saved all her images to a disk - and then accidentally sat on it. A man whose several thousand dollar camera was mud-covered and irreparable after the June floods.

We all know backing up our digital images is important, but few realize just how important.

"People do not realize that your chance of losing (your images) is greater than your chance of getting struck by lightning," Walden said. "With film, our backup was negatives. In the digital age, we need to create our own backups."

He said people should follow the 2-2-2 rule: Back up images two times in two formats and two places. Having two formats is especially important, Walden said, because any given format could become obsolete.

"We don't know what the media of the future will be," he said, "NASA actually lost a lot of their information that way, because their machines couldn't read the floppy discs."

The best way to store photos? Print, print, print.

But the percentage of prints made is down - way down - from the days of film. According to a study by the Photo Marketing Association International, the number of digital images saved in the U.S. but not printed was 1.4 billion in 2001. For this year it's a projected 17.4 billion. The trend does show some signs of reversing, however. Before the digital age, about 90 percent of all images captured were printed in one form or another. That number dipped below 10 percent in 2004 and 2005 but is now slowly rising.

"It's never going to get back to what it was in the past, but people are going to start printing more because they realize they like having the printed photos around, especially the older generation," said Kelly Davis, a photo lab specialist at Hawkeye Community College.

Also playing into the trend is the viewing screen on the back of most digital cameras. It lets you see immediately who blinked or made a face at the camera.

"With film they were forced to stay on top of it. There was that anticipation of 'What did I get?'" said Walden. Now, with 70 percent of all camera-owning households using a digital camera, Walden said that lack of anticipation means trips to photo processing centers are fewer and print orders, sometimes the result of several years of image stockpiling, are larger.

"We'll see a Christmas tree (on someone's disk) but we don't know what year it's from," he said.

But even as print quantities remain meager, the popularity of other photo-related products is on the rise.

Keepsakes and gifts, such as images printed on T-shirts, are becoming more prevalent. And uploading images to a Web site to be printed and picked up or shipped directly to the home, a practice called "click to brick," is especially popular. But while the Internet may provide a convenient way to order photos or share with family and friends, Walden cautions against using it as a way of backing up photos. Sites should be carefully researched, he said, because many of his clients have lost their photos after a site was shut down.

"I think it could be a digital dark age," said Steve Kelly, a technical sales representative at American Color Imaging in Cedar Falls. But with proper safeguarding, there's no reason for digital images to become lost memories.

Contact Laura Grevas at

newsroom@wcfcourier.com.