Digital photo images can use up a lot of disk storage space and this creates major problems for school networks.
For example, the total size of all the folders of images for one class, stored in their original format, was about 100MB. We created an archive folder for these images on a removable zip disk. Schools without an Iomega Zip drive or similar removable storage system can always save the images onto the hard drive, but if you are going to work with a number of classes, some way of storing images is going to be essential if you are not going to fill the hard drive of your main computer.
The folders of images saved as JPG files came to just under 50MB and these were placed in a shared access area on the server.
PROBLEM: it seems that Photoshop will only allow one version of a file to be opened at a time and locks out files with multiple access. The result of this was that when we tried to open the files from the File >Open routine we could not access the folder and load an image directly. One solution was to open a window which showed the file we wanted, open the Photoshop programme and then use Click and Drag to copy the file from the window onto the Photoshop desktop. This was a very messy way of working and not helpful for students who lacked confidence navigating around folders on the network. A simpler option is for the students to select the images they want to use and for them to copy these images to their own folder on the network.
BUT the draw back is that this can easily fill up their own server space, typically 5MB, before they have even started to create new images. The importance of using the lowest acceptable resolution and image size for the original images becomes apparent. You will certainly have to negotiate for more server space for your classes, 10MB per student would be a minimum. Another useful strategy is to use low resolution images to experiment with and then use the higher resolution images for finished pieces of work.