What you need to know about where you store your digital photos.

Hard drives store all of our digital memories so it's important to know just how long they'll last. Fortunately, we now have a better idea.

In a previous post we touched on just how fleeting digital photographs are. While we're capturing images with the latest d-SLRs and smartphones, these photos have a much greater chance of disappearing before we have grandkids than the images snapped with film cameras of old.

This Christmas, my parents presented my aunt with a collage of photos of their parents (my grandparents) in their younger years. As I looked at those old photos I was struck with a powerful question -- would my grandkids be able to do the same with all those digital photos I've been snapping? It's a tough question. During my parent's era, making sure family photos survived for generations was simply a matter of keeping track of a box of prints.

When photography was prints, saving them for future generations was pretty straightforward: you’d print them, slap them in an album, put the album in a box and put the box

Hidden inside your photos is a powerful wealth of information. It's called EXIF data and it holds the key to improving your photography, organizing your images, protecting your privacy and safeguarding your copyrights. Yet many of us don't know it exists, much less what to do with it.

With your copy of Photo Studio 16, you’ve got everything you need to take your images to the next level. But how’s your hardware? We’ve identified three tools that will