Article 1 Published 2025-02-22

The Importance of a Good Storage Solution

Why You Should Care about Storage

Often times a photographer is shooting hundreds of photos every shoot. Many times clients may misplace a photo whether physically or virtually and could come looking to the original photographer to save the day. The thing is how does a photographer go about saving the photos themselves so they can provide this experience if necessary. Many photographers don’t have a solution and some even delete the images as soon as they are delivered. I personally don’t recommend that and instead suggest a 3 point storage solution.

Storage Also Matters on Location

Storage on location also matters quite a lot as that is when your media is at its most volatile. Often unless you have the highest end camera you are writing to a single memory card and until you get to a place where you can dump that footage it is the only place that image exists. Because of this it is very important that you take good care of your memory cards and have backups. First things first you should be formatting your cards before every shoot to make sure they are in their best condition and least likely to corrupt. Always make sure you definitely dumped the old photos before doing so.

Physical Storage of the Virtual Storage

I personally recommend having multiple storage devices on hand for your camera. That way at pivotal moments during a shoot you can swap so at least those photos are relatively secure. Say you just got done with the wedding and are moving to the reception, perfect time to switch, or you did one set for a shoot with a model and they are now swapping outfits, great, card swap. The main problem with this recommendation is you can physically misplace the card when doing this so make sure you have a secure location where your cards always go so that way you don’t physically misplace them. I think big businesses would call this 5S. They make card holders specifically for this kind of thing.

The Shoot is Finished Time for Initial Storage

Alright so the shoot is wrapped. What should a photographer do first. The primary thing on your mind should be getting that data to its long term storage area or at least an intermediate redundant storage. I bring my laptop with me on shoots and while I do not primarily use it for my editing unless I am on the road it comes in handy for a couple other things. First it has plenty of physical storage that I can use temporarily on its SSD. I copy over the data from my SD cards immediately on location. Then as soon as I can get an internet connection whether that be tethering to my phone or wifi I copy those photos again to a google drive. Funny enough that is technically a 3 point storage solution or a 321 storage practice. 3 copies, 2 technologies, 1 off-site. I won’t get into exactly what that means but your data is now very secure for the short term storage.

The 3 Point Solution

Alright now for the permanent storage that your clients don’t realize they care about until they really need it. The whole point of this article. The 3 point storage solution. Let’s break down exactly what this is. It is a pretty simple concept but can be costly to implement. The whole goal is get it stored 3 different locations one being off site. Redundancy is what keeps virtual data secure. The reason it can get expensive is too record that data in triplicate. That hard-drive that is filled on your PC should be 3. The highest end of this is 3 servers you own and maintain with raid arrays two in separate locations on site of your business and one in some off site location. As a small photography business you can be pretty secure without all of that with a simple and cheaper solution. Using Dellaphotographia as an example and what I would recommend to most small photography businesses is either two separate drives on one PC where you save the images on both and then replicate them to a Google or some other sort of cloud storage. Some variations of this could include a NAS that either has all the data across multiple drives in it or on the PC, in the NAS, and on the cloud. This is secure enough for most professional photographers.

Getting the photos to your clients

How we provide the photos at Dellaphotographia the client can reference their photos at any point in the future. Upon a digital delivery they get provided a secure passcode that they can use while viewing their images their whole shoot isn’t on display for just anyone to see. From the downloads section of the website the client can select their individual shoots and view their gallery on the website and then download all of their photos from the google drive. This creates ease of retrieval for all their photos from any time after their release creating a pleasurable customer experience.