Wedding Photographers Blog

Wedding photographers now have a elephantine predicament with digital photography: How do you store all those photos?!

Here are some suggestions:

1. External Hard Drives
2. Online Storage
3. DAM Expert – Hire a digital asset management expert

Here are some real world solutions.

• Create a Workflow where you copy the DVD twice. One in a lightsafe box and another possibly in a fireproof safe or safebox at the bank
• Get a hard drive that mirrors your hard drives as they’re being created. This is usually called a RAID Array. They come in 4 configurations. Not tech savvy? Hire a IT Tech to help you.
• Buy multiple hard drives. Manually make sure they’re on different hard drives
• Upload your photos onto the internet. I highly suggest SmugMug.

Backing up immediately

I like backing images immediately. After shooting a wedding make sure you burn and copy all your photos onto a dvd. DVD’s nowadays are very cheap and can be a good way to back up your files initially.

Backup onto another hard drive. Hard drives are pretty cheap nowadays. Some even come with built in RAID abilities. Which means if one of your hard drives fail you can just swap it out with another one.

Worried about Fire, Viruses or Theft? Find Another Space

Worried about fireproofing? Even if you do backup all your files with dvd it doesn’t mean that your place is fireproof. Heres some ideas:

1. Buy a Fireproof Safe – Purchase a safe and place your hard drives or dvds into that safe. But you could imagine eventuall you’d run out of space. This might be the best solution if you’re just starting.
2. Bank – rent a safe keeping box at the bank and store your dvd’s as well as important business assets there.
3. Online – Online is always another great option here.

Online Services

Smugmug is an excellent option. Smugmug allows unlimited storage as well as allows you to sell photos online through their website. Just purchase the account and there are many options that they provide to upload your photos: Lightroom, Browser Uploading, etc.

Mozy is an online backup service. You download their software and it automatically backup areas of your computer. The service is pretty  transparent. I’ve never really actually tried it but their services are pretty affordable.

Carbonite is another online service that mirrors your computer data. It requires installing client software as well. Backups are scheduled automatically and are pretty transparent.

• December 2, 2009 -- Digital Asset Management – Cheap DIY NAS Server
• January 28, 2009 -- Contact Sheets with Indesign