I carry 3 - 1 Gig cards, four sets of batteries, two different card readers. Throughout a weekend, I copy the pictures to a laptop hard drive. After I get back from the shoot I dump everything to a desktop.

That's where I throw away the duds. I figure at least 1 in 3 pictures hit the bit-basket, before I even start looking closer. Another 3rd get dumped upon further review.

After a last review, everything is backed up to a DVD (or CD) and then I start editing. This is just in case I do something stupid and want the original back.

Then I rename everything to the event and date for future ease in finding things. Otherwise you'll end up with every picture you take, being img_#### which means nothing.

Every time you open and save a JPG file, you lose a little. Once or twice, for a 4x6 to crop it, and make color correction, isn't going to be noticable.

As long as the original is open, it doesn't matter what you do to it. It's every subsequent time, that produces more compression and more degradition.

We've covered this before. Copying a picture, from one place to another, doesn't change it at all. Renaming it doesn't change anything.

If you want to open and close and edit and re-edit and "whatever", open the JPG then save it as a BMP (which is not compressed) then do all your editing on the BMP and finally save it as a JPG again.

Get this! Free software.

http://www.irfanview.com

By the way, the largest you'll normally want to go with a 6 MP image is 8 x 10. I've made worse, like 1 or 2 MP images into 8 x 10s, but it's rare that they will look like anything you would show to someone and be proud of.

Reduced from 3072x2048 (6mp) to 640x480 less than 1MP. Bottom image is original size, cropped. It was opened and saved 2 times. The waves are from engine heat. The bottom image was opened and saved only once. I can't see a difference. (yes the #2 is out of focus, darn!)