WHAT FILE TYPE TO CHOOSE?

 You must learn how to save files to store your digital pictures. I'm not going to get into how to save, you can find help for that in almost any programs' help file. But I will tell you what type of file to choose for PC users, sorry, I don't know anything about Mac but I have read that TIFF works with Mac.. For storage choose BMP or TIFF, then if you decide to do a little touch-up on the pict you won't loose quality. With a JPEG every time you open it up and work on it and save you loose quality which can never be recovered. I sometimes save the picture in both formats in different folders to cut back time, then if I suddenly want to send a picture to someone, it's already there. If you just want to email them to someone then use JPEG, it's compressed and won't take a year to send or receive.  A good range for emailing is 600 to 750 pixels (width) x 300 to 500 pixels (height) or 5 to 7 inches (width) x 3.5 to 5 inches (height). When resizing be sure to look for a setting to "keep aspect ratio", that will retain your width and height relationship so you won't get distortion in your image. When you select one size setting it will automatically update the other. 

And back your pictures up, if you have a burner, that's great, you can put them all on a CD. But you can also save to a floppy, you will have to watch your file size for that. My mega pixel camera on the BEST setting opens a picture larger than a normal letter size page (printer view) and when saved as a BMP without any resizing the file size is over 6 megabytes. (too big for a floppy disk) When you back them up you won't loose that picture you liked so much of Uncle Tom's cabin if your computer crashes.  :) Of course, that goes for all your files, your hard drive won't last forever, sooner or later something will go wrong and you will be happy that you've backed everything up.