How to Backup Your Photos

Your beautiful baby arrived into this world and like a good mom/dad you hired a professional newborn photographer to capture this fleeting time.  You loved the session, selected your digitals and the photographer sent you the download link.  Days go by, weeks go by, maybe even years go by and you realized you never did anything with that link!  Most photography contracts state that once the photographer delivers the digitals to you you are then responsible for maintaining them!     Or, what if you did download them and years have gone by and then your computer crashes!  This could be a complete nightmare!  Those images would be gone forever.  Technology is a wonderful thing . . . until it fails.  Don’t be on the end of this no win situation!  Below are a few guidelines on how to back up your photos (digital images) from your newborn photography session – or any session really!

Download your images

I think it goes without saying that you should download ALL of your images as soon as you get the link!  If you purchased the full gallery and fell in love with 80% of them don’t leave the 20% behind.  I have heard so many moms say “Oh, I don’t like the way I look in that one” or “my belly looks too big”.  STOP!!  You are looking at those images with a critical eye.  I can guarantee you that in 20 years your baby is going to LOVE seeing you holding/loving them!  I can also guarantee you that your child will NOT be looking at your belly!

Have a local backup of your images

When you hit the download button your images will be saved somewhere on your hard drive (make sure you know where they are!).  This is your primary location.  Now, you should also move them to a secondary backup location.  That way, if one of your hard drives fail you will still have them on the other drive.  Some experts even suggest a 3rd backup location as well!  Your backup drive can be a second computer, external hard drive or a flash drive.

Backup images to the cloud

Cloud storage is system where you move your files from your computer to a server in a data center somewhere in magical cyber space. Though cloud storage is a great backup option, there are still a few risks. Cloud storage services can be and have been hacked and if the company goes out of business you won’t be able to access any of the files you’ve stored in your account.  Don’t let this scare you from using cloud storage.  Just don’t rely on it as your sole source of backup.

Have physical copies

Digitals are lovely.  But I can guarantee you that nobody is going to snuggle up with your desktop on their laps and sit by a fire to look at all of your photos.  People crave tangible photos!  Prints, albums, wall art etc.  People pay premium prices for professional photography and then they let them sit on a hard drive somewhere.  That’s crazy!  My kids LOVE flipping through our photo albums.  It’s so adorable seeing how they laugh, giggle and reminisce about how little they looked or how funny their clothes were.  There are so many option for printing your images.  We will talk about that in a future post!

And, what’s a post without some adorable babies.