Raw

Copy them Woo, and then convert to J peg, that way you keep your original.

I've never used raw, as I see it as something thats well above anything I'm likely to do with my pictures.

What are the advantages of raw pics Woo?

 

They say a little knowlege is a dangerous thing:D

But well done for experimenting.

If someone comes up with an advantage later, I might try myself.

 

I don't have a modern enough camera to be able to use camera raw, but I do have Photoshop which has it's own facilities to handle camera raw.

Hope the following may answer your question and prove useful to somebody:

As far as I can see from the info. the whole point of it is so that you can get much better editing facilites from it, but you will need a very good editor programme to do it with. If you don't have something like Photoshop then you are probably wasting your time setting your camera to it in the first place.

It appears that all images start off as camera raw and are usually edited by the camera, as it forms the usual jpeg images, with a lot of the original and most useful data thrown away. So from there on you are relatively limited to the editing possibilities. Each make of camera does this in it's own way.

I think I am right in saying that when you have finished your advanced editing in this way you can then save it as a jpeg and use as usual, all your fine editing having been achieved.

 

Woo - I very much doubt if you'll find any sites that will accept RAW images as there are at least two different RAW formats. Also as you've already found RAW images are muckle big files compared with jpeg files and sites like this (GC) couldn't cope with a large number of RAW images as the file servers would soon run out of space.
Saving your pics from camera in RAW format does undoubtedly give you more fine control over image quality as you've got a heck of a lot more image data to work with.
I've been working more or less solely in RAW format since May this year and have found the extra fine contol over exposure, colour temperature and sharpness etc can make a significant difference over processing in jpg/jpeg format.
The simple bottom line is that by using RAW, you can produce (or improve on) what your camera could have done if you'd set all the controls at he optimum for the shot. Tweaking a jpeg doesn't give as much control over the final image as tweaking a RAW, but the difference between an un-tweaked RAW and un-tweaked jpeg would not be really discernable.

(Any images I've posted in the un-enhanced comps have been the original RAW files converted to jpeg without any enhancement) BTW that's the way cameras work when shooting jpegs. The internal software does a very clever bit of maths and converts and compresses the image data 'seen' by the sensor. The down-side of conversion to jpeg is that a lot of the original image data is just thrown away.

 

Poor Woo I do hope you manage to find your photo collection, I for one would be devastated if I lost mine.:cry: Ive got all my fingers and toes crossed for you. GOOD LUCK:thmb: 02

 

WOO - Are you really certain that you've lost your complete collection of photos? Unless you've deliberately/accidentally deleted them AND emptied your "Recycle Bin" they must still be on your HDD somewhere.

BTW - An additional external drive is a great investment. Just as long as you remember to use it. Like wot I often forget to do!