Archival storage of digital pictures has become much easier and less expensive in the past couple of years. Unless you just cashed out of your dot-com IPO with a few billion to spare, it is impractical to use CompactFlash cards or other digital film to store all your digital pictures. They are too expensive. There are two kinds of storage that are important:

Short Term (on a field trip)

This kind of storage is used to store several days or weeks of pictures until you get home. There are a number of commercial products on the market designed to fill this niche, check out Digital Photography Review for the latest and greatest. We use a notebook computer with a 1.3 GB hard disk to store images temporarily on trips. We have added a portable CD-RW drive that connects via a parallel (printer) port or a PCMCIA card to permit the notebook computer to record CDs. This permits the field setup, with a quantity of CD-Recordable disks, to store a virtually infinite number of pictures on a trip. If our notebook computer supported USB, we probably would have gotten a USB CD-RW drive. We also could give copies of pictures to friends and relatives we visit.

Long Term (Archival Storage)

For long term storage of digital images, there is only one storage medium I recommend: recordable CD disks (CD-Rs). There are two kinds of recordable CDs - CD-Rs (write-once) and CD-RWs (re-writable CD-Rs). I personally prefer the write-once CD-Rs for all archival storage. If you buy CD-R media on sale, you can get CD-R disks capable of storing 650 MB of pictures for between 50 and 75 cents each. That breaks down to permanent, archival storage of images for about a 1/10 of a penny an image. A lot cheaper than prints at those one hour photo places. A CD-R can be read in any computer CD drive (unlike a CD-RW) so you can blow an entire 75 cents and send a copy of 600 of your vacation pictures to any relative who has a computer. CD-R drives that are capable of making CD-R disks can be commonly found for less than $200, and if you shop around, occasionally for around $100. Small price for making permanent, sharable copies of your digital images.

Online

A variety of sites are springing up allowing online storage of your photos. Some sites are just basic storage, to share images electronically in digital albums over the internet. Others allow you to make prints (and other things like t-shirts) with your images. Some of these sites go beyond online photo storage, offering communities of users who share information, online chats with photographers, photo contests, and often online stores where you can buy cameras and supplies.