We live in a digital age and the trend nowadays is to get a digital copy of all your wedding photographs from your photographer. Usually these will be in high resolution JPG format, either delivered on USB or via a download from their gallery site.
Most couple’s will look through their wedding photographs when they receive them before safely storing their USB away in a cupboard.
However this is not a great idea. Let me explain why. Firstly a myriad of things can happen. What if you lose the USB? What if it breaks? After all, it is just an electronic device and these do have a limited lifespan.
Also think about what your wedding photographs are to you? It’s a priceless family heirloom which documents your family on one of the most important days of your life right? How would you feel if you lost them? Doesn’t it make sense to make sure they’re safely protected?
Of course as a professional wedding photographer serving Nottingham & Derby, I go to great lengths to ensure your wedding photos are properly protected. In fact I often advise other fellow professionals on best practice to make sure your precious memories are stored safely. Will I still have your photos? What if I’m not around anymore? Who knows what will happen in ten, twenty years time.
Here are a few ideas which you can use to ensure that your images are protected from all eventualities.
THE WEDDING ALBUM
It might be a digital world but a real wedding album still has the wow factor. Not only is your album a great way for you to share your day with family & friends, it is also the perfect way to preserve your memories.
Just imagine for a moment in twenty to thirty years time. With luck you’ll be sat down with your grandchildren and they will want to look at your wedding photographs. Just like you wanted to know all about your grandparents when they were young. Now imagine pulling out a USB……It would be the modern day equivalent of pulling out a strip of film negatives. They’ll look at the USB with a mixture of amusement and curiousity! How quaint!
Instead a physical album will stand the test of time. Sit down and flick through the pages with them. Let them laugh instead at the ‘old fashion’ clothes everyone wore and the hilarious haircuts. Just like you did with your parents and grandparents!
A professional wedding album will be designed to last forever and still look great. Even decades on.
COMPUTER BACKUP
As someone who worked in IT for over 15 years, backups were instilled in me as a necessity. Murphy’s law dictates that if it can go wrong then it will. Believe it or not, the computer’s hard disk is THE most likely component to fail. If you’ve downloaded your images to your computer and not backed it up then you may end up losing your photos.
Make sure you keep a copy elsewhere. That could be on a USB, a removable hard disk or use a cloud backup service.
CLOUD BACKUP SERVICES
There are plenty of ways to store your wedding photographs online nowadays. The obvious one of course is Facebook but I don’t recommend this since Facebook only stores low resolution images and to save space uses aggressive compression. As a result, photographs may look great on your screen but not if you print them out.
Instead I would recommend Google Photos. This is a FREE service which anyone can download and use. There is no limit on the amount of photographs you store if your original photographs are less than 16MP.
There are many other options such Amazon Prime, Dropbox etc but typically they only give a small amount of ‘free’ space, otherwise you must pay. This is why I am reticent to recommend them as a long term storage solution.
CHECK CHECK & CHECK AGAIN
Just because you’ve have stored your images in multiple locations, it is worth occasionally checking to make sure nothing untoward has happened. I cannot imagine anything worse than in a few years time realising your USB has stopped working and only then looking at Google Photos and for example realising you cannot access your account for some reason.
You don’t have to check daily or even weekly but every year or two would give you the comfort you need that your photographs are safely stored.
SUMMARY
I recognise this is probably a bit of a boring subject for most. Chances are you are reading this as a bride to be and frankly, choosing your wedding dress is much more exciting! However, please do remember that technology does eventually go obsolete. All equipment can break. A few minutes to ensure your photographs are safely backed up could save you a lot of heartache in years to come!
Share this story
