The best way to store your photos

What is the best way to store your photos? You go to nice places, you spend hours shooting, you spend hours editing, maybe you even do this for a living and you have clients relying on you to deliver them their photos. It’s a lot of work, a bunch of material that took you time and most possibly money to produce and after all, are you keeping your photos safe?

I’ve been shooting professionally for about three years now and this was a concern I had from the first paid jobs I did and that only grew stronger on me, since about a year after I started shooting I also started doing weddings . A wedding is just one of the most important day’s of a couple’s life and you really want to make sure you keep their photos as a treasure!

Not only that, if you shoot professionally you will want to keep your portfolio safe, as it is your business card!

It is what will sell you as a photographer and even if you’re not a professional photographer, you might have taken some special photos of a special trip or some special moments of your life and you will want to keep all of that material safe.

So here’s what I do to store my photos and keep them safe!

My first copy goes to my external HD. I use the Lacie as it looks tougher and stronger to me but I can’t say how long it lasts yet. What I can say is I’ve had some external HDs of other brands before and after a couple of years, 50% of them simply stopped working! Just like that! Out of nothing. No fall, no nothing, they just got tired. I bought the Lacie Rugged (https://geni.us/oY7WC8) about one year ago and so far so good! It is a more expensive external HD, but I've heard really good things about it, so I decided to invest on a better HD this time. Still, knowing that the possibility of my external HD dying exists, I ALWAYS have a second back up.

As soon as I upload the photos to the external HD, I have my photos automatically uploaded to the cloud service I use. I use the Drive from Google (https://refergsuite.app.goo.gl/vFdt), but that’s up to you. You can go with the One drive from Microsoft, the Apple cloud, Dropbox, or whatever you think is best.

But if you want to keep your photos safe, it is massively important that you have your photos in more than one device and safer than having two physical devices, is, in my opinion, having a physical and a virtual one. There’s no way you can break or lose a virtual copy and if you don’t have your external HD with you, you still have access to your work from anywhere in the world!

I can’t count how many times I was abroad, in the middle of nowhere, without my external HD and someone asked me for a photo, a logo, or something that I could only be able to send straight away because I had a cloud backup. All I needed was 3G or a wi-fi available and, done! I got all of my files available in any device I had with me. Could be a phone, could be someone else’s phone or computer, whatever! Login, password, share the link, done!

You can sync your external HD to your cloud service in a way every time you upload something new to your external HD, it will be automatically uploaded also to your cloud. So you don’t need to worry about saving it to both locations. You just upload them to your HD and done!

I myself don’t ever upload my photos to my computer because I do many photography jobs, I shoot raw, and therefore, I’d need a computer with a massive storage to be able to keep it all in there without having it full every now and then. For that reason, I upload them straight to my external HD, create Collections in Lightroom and edit from there.

For my videos, I temporarily upload the videos I will use for a specific project to Final Cut Pro and, once I’m done with editing, I just transfer them all to my external HD, that will automatically send them to my cloud as well, and then I’m done!

That’s all! A physical copy and a virtual copy! Do that and your photos should be safe!

MY EXTERNAL HD, the LACIE RUGGED 2T — https://geni.us/oY7WC8

G SUITE (GOOGLE DRIVE) — https://refergsuite.app.goo.gl/vFdt

Get 20% off for a year using G Suite using my code — 34CMPK9ERXNWUWA

www.priscilaeliasphotography.com