After COVID pandemic started in 2020, many photographers must have changed what and how they photograph with certain restrictions on travels and group activities. Some started product photography or macro photography where they can enjoy at home. Some learned how to use external lighting. I lost many opportunities of taking photographs because I mainly shoot my kids playing soccer and travel photography, and I spent most of my free time not taking photos, but editing my old photographs and looked at how I store my old photographs. It is a good practice to review photo storage options as many people take a lot more photos on smartphones, image sizes continue to increase, we need to adjust the methods and sizes of our photo storages.. How are you saving and storing your photographs? In this post, I share my photo storing practices.
How many of you have lost photographs/images or any data on your PC? I hope there are not that many. But I can almost guarantee it will happen soon or later. A lot of people do not realize any data storage media is NOT permanent. Most of us do not think of this on a day to day. Regardless of the types of the media (HDD, SSD, USB, Bluray etc), has life expectancy and all data storage will stop working sooner or later. As we photographers spend a lot of money on gear and travel, hundreds of hours shooting and editing, losing photographs would be a devastating experience. For that reason, saving and storing photographs is one of the most important processes in enjoying photography.
How many images do you have on your phone?
How many photographs do you have overall and what is your storage size?
Imagine losing all of them. I can tell from my own experience it is emotionally devastating. This is the reason I spend time saving and storing photographs carefully and in multiple methods at multiple locations. Managing photo storage can be a daunting task if you do anything in addition to putting them on your PC. With the advancement of technology, the file size for each image has increased over the years. Also, most of us have multiple devices to edit and enjoy photographs. These factors add additional challenges. But once I established the process that worked for me, it did not take too much time getting used to the workflow.
Not many people have lost photographs. But I bet there are a lot more people who have lost unsaved data for work or school using Excel, PowerPoint, or Word. How many of you have experienced a dead hard drive? Do you remember how frustrating it was? Imagine you saved all of your photos on a hard drive and it dies on you. What do you do?
I have lost some photos on a NAS before. It completely died on me without any signs of deterioration. It was emotionally devastating experience. I sat there motionless for few min. "Speechless" is a great term to describe me at the time. I tried to figure out ways to retrieve photos. I spent hours searching on the web for what to do. In the end, I gave up. While it may have been possible to recover the data, I would have to spend a lot of money for a professional service. Through this experience, I learned to save and store photographs using multiple methods and at multiple locations.
I use a Windows PC as a main machine for editing photos at home for the past few years. For editing photographs, I added an additional SSD. As it is an internal, it is really convenient. But more importantly, it allows me to hedge risks against OS troubles and also speed of SSD.
Over the years, I have had few OS issues where I had to reinstall OS and all software, losing data on the same drive. There are professional data recovery services, and it is costly. It is something most people cannot do anything on their own. Having all photos on a separate drive avoids such issues, and I can move the drive to another device if I decide to upgrade my PC. It is simple and fairly cost effective way to have a main photo storage.
There are few reasons I chose SSD over HDD. Yes, I am using a laptop and there is not space for SSD. But even if I was using a desktop PC, I would choose SSD over HDD for a main storage. SSDs tend to have less issues and faster speed. HDDs have physical disk that spins meaning there are moving parts. SSDs on the other hand do not have any moving parts. Physically, HDDS have a higher risk of troubles with moving parts. Also, SSDs offer higher speed. When I am editing photos, slow speed can be stressful when I am editing a lot of photos.
The prices of SSDs have come down a lot though they are still more expensive than HDDs. For now, the SSD I have on my PC is big enough to hold all photos I have. But I may either need to get a higher capacity SSD or be selective about photos I store on SSD for 1) photos to edit and 2) best shots.
While my main storage is an internal SSD, I use an external HDD for the main backup. Main reason is HDDs are cost effective. I have a 4TB RAID drive where I dump all photos and other files as well. I considered NAS as well. But I simply did not find anything that I was truly able to trust (given my experience with a dead NAS). The factors I considered while choosing an external HDD was 1) size, 2) ease of swapping HDD, and 3) connectivity (USB3 & USB-C).
Since it is a RAID, it gives additional comfort in having redundancy and storing photos.
In 2023, I believe most people use some type of online storage services. Apple provides iCloud. Google provides Google Drive. Microsoft provides One Drive. These services are free for certain amount of storage and subscription fees for additional storage. I use all of these at some capacity. But for storing photographs, I user Amazon Photos. The reason is this is a part of Amazon Prime. Most people know Amazon Prime provides 2 day free shipping and Prime Video. But for photographers, the benefit of Amazon Photos are 1) unlimited photo storage (Yes, unlimited!) and 2) supports RAW file format (for Canon for sure).
In general, I do not like subscription services and I try to consolidate as much as possible. While Amazon Prime has increased its cost over the years, unlimited photo storage along with other benefits are no brainer. It also offers desktop and mobile app for Amazon Photos where I have auto upload/backup of photographs I save on my SSD. This automation along with the support for RAW files, I do not have to worry about additional steps and simply upload photos to my PC. For mobile, all photos and videos are uploaded once I am connected to WiFi. Amazon Photos definitely provides additional comfort in having all photos I have online where I can view and also download if something happens to my local devices. For details of Amazon Photos, please check here.
Yes, you read it correctly. DVD-R. Most of PCs on the market do not even have an optical drive. Some of you may not have even seen a DVD-R disc. Also, DVD-R discs have a small capacity of 4.7GB which is smaller than the memory cards most of us have in our cameras. But I own an external DVD-RW drive for the purpose of storing best photos on DVD-R discs and storing at my desk at my work. Yes, this probably is an overkill, especially given the fact I have all my photos on Amazon Photos. Just in case some natural disaster hits the area or something unimaginable happens on Amazon Photos, I like to keep best photos of the year on DVD-R discs. If you are to invest in an optical drive, I would recommend Blu-ray drive with BD-XL with 128GB of storage.
With these four methods, I feel pretty confident in storing photographs and safety of my images. Even if you do not want all four, I would highly recommend an external HDD and Amazon Photos as the basic photo storing processes.
In addition to saving and storing at home, I have certain practices when I am on the go. Other than taking photos of my kids playing soccer, I shoot when I am traveling for work. My trips are usually at least a week long, and I usually have time editing photos at hotels or in the air. As the risk of losing images on the go is still there, I have few methods of saving photos.
Most of higher end cameras offer dual card slots where photographers can record images on two separate cards simultaneously. 5D Mark II and R5 both offer dual card slots. This is a feature that is extremely important to photographers who get paid to shoot. While I have never experienced any issues with memory cards and I am not paid to shoot, losing photos of places I take on the go is something I would like to even think of. Some places I have shot are places I am not very likely to visit again or places that are not easy to reach on a regular basis. I want to be extra cautious. Being able to record on two cards simultaneously is something I really appreciate.
In addition to using dual card, I also use smaller memory cards rather than using big memory cards. As I only shoot still photos and do not shoot video, there is no reason for me to have memory cards with big capacity. Also, I do not like having all my photos on two cards that are in my camera. While having the dual card slot and recording on two cards simultaneously reduces the risk of losing photos, there is a risk of something happening to the camera. There have be increasing cases of photographers targeted for theft. If my camera gets stolen, it can be replaced. But images that are stolen with a camera cannot be. Using multiple cards and limiting the number of images on each card will reduce the risk of losing all images if something happens to my camera. Some of the memory cards are still expensive. But most retailers have sales on memory cards several times a year. I would recommend waiting for these sales events and adding to your camera bag. For carrying
Just like at home, I upload all my photos on a PC after shootings. There are a couple of differences from work. First, I usually do not have my personal PC and upload to my work Mac. From there, I upload photos to Amazon Photos manually. Second, I save photos to an external SSD I take to trips. I use SanDisk Extreme Portable SSD. It is water, dust, and shock proof which gives me little comfort. Also, it is a SSD drive with USB C which is fast enough dump a lot of photos and edit them when I want to without stress.
These practices may be overkill for some of you. But the key is to save photos in multiple methods at multiple locations. This will mitigate the risks of losing your photos and losing the time and money you invested in taking photographs. Yes, it can be a tedious workflow. I strongly recommend having multiple methods of saving/storing photos. You will feel more comfortable and can enjoy photography by knowing your photos are safe regardless of where you are.
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