Ok, so you’ve spent all of this money on camera gear. You’ve bought a camera body, lenses, batteries, memory cards, bags, etc., etc., etc. You maybe even spent some money on a trip somewhere to take photographs. You’ve taken dozens or even hundreds of photographs. Now what? What do you do with those photographs?
That’s where storage becomes an issue. How do you store all of these photos? Well, I have some ideas. For this post, I break down storage into two categories, 1) short term or while you are making the photographs in the field or on a trip and 2) long term or once you have selected your “keepers” and want to store them. For this post, I’ll break down what I do for both short term and long-term photo storage. Obviously, there are many different options for photo storage at many different price points and technology levels. This is not a one size fits all thing so please take from this what you can and feel free to share some of your ideas and experiences in the comments. Here we go.
Short Term Storage:
My first camera, the Nikon D3100 only had one SD card slot in the camera. So, while I was shooting, I could only use one card. When the card filled, I would swap it out for a clean card, keep shooting, and store the full card somewhere safe in my camera bag. I never had a card fail so I never lost any images. If a card had failed, I would have lost photos. My current camera, the Nikon D750, has dual SD card slots that can be configured in many different ways. Personally, I have the camera set to save duplicate images to both cards. That puts my photographs on two cards while I am out shooting. That way, if one card fails, I have the image on the other card. Now, to be honest, SD cards from good brands are super reliable and don’t generally fail. You don’t need a camera with dual slots or anything like that to take good photos. However, if your camera happens to have dual slots, consider storing duplicate images on both cards just in case.
If I am on vacation, I simply use a fresh card each day for shooting so that I can easily tell which day’s photos were on a card and limit photo loss in the event of a card failure. After I get home from shooting I put the cards into the computer, decide on the keepers, and then put the keepers into long term storage.
The one exception I to this system is my upcoming trip to Hawaii. As I mentioned in my post about my new camera backpack, I will be taking my laptop with me on the trip because the trip is long enough that I may need to be able to access my office. Because I will have my laptop with me, I will also bring my small SSD drive. That way, at the end of each day I can back up my daily card onto my laptop and the SSD drive so that I have all of my photos in 3 places until I get back home. Once I get home I will then file the photos into my long-term storage system that is outlined below.
Long-Term Storage:
Once you’ve selected your keepers, how do you store them? There are many options at many price points. On the bright side, we live in an age when hard drive storage is extremely affordable so you can be sure that your photos are safe without breaking the bank. However, we also live in a time of serious technology so, if you have the bank, you can do some really interesting set-ups as well.
I have always been of the opinion that important things, such as keeper photos, should be stored in more than one location so that if you should have a hard drive crash, you have a copy elsewhere. So, I keep multiple copies of my photos in different locations.
My Long-Term Storage Set-Up:
I have a large hard drive (5TB) attached to the router in my home. It is my main back up for all of my files. The drive is not visible to people on my wi-fi network and is password protected so that even if you can see it, you can’t get into it. If that drive ever fills (I doubt that will happen), I can just purchase a larger drive to replace it and copy everything over to the larger drive.
I also keep a duplicate of all of my photos on a portable hard drive that I keep locked in an off-site location. Then, because I am generally paranoid, I keep a third set of my photos on an external SSD drive that I carry in my bag. As such, at any time, I have three copies of all of my photos allowing for two simultaneous hard drive crashes without data loss. The whole set up was only a few hundred dollars because external hard drives, like the ones I use, are not terribly expensive. By way of example, over the past weekend I was just at Costco and saw a 2TB portable drive for $60 and a 5TB portable drive for $100. They also had an 8TB drive that can attach to your router for $170 and a 1TB SSD for $100. (For point of reference, photos even at 24 megapixels are measured in MB. All of my photos don’t even add up to 500MB or 1/2 of a TB and I keep more photos than just my actual “keepers”). I’m sure that Amazon or Best Buy or other stores have similar sized drives for similar prices as well.
If you have more money, and some more technology savvy abilities, you can do a RAID set-up to store your photos. (This is about to be a super oversimplified description of a RAID system. There are many variations of RAID and many variations of how they store files, but this will give you the general principle.) A RAID device is a device that holds more than one hard drive and it keeps the multiple drives duplicated so that if one of the drives fails, another has a complete copy without you having to constantly back-up your files manually. The RAID device keeps everything synced constantly. If you add your photos to one of the drives, it is duplicated onto the RAID back up drive immediately by the RAID device. Then, should one of the hard drives in the RAID device fail, you just replace the failed drive and the RAID device automatically copies the data onto the replacement drive so you have duplicate copies again. The drives are usually even “hot swappable” meaning that you can replace the damaged drive without having to turn off or reboot the RAID device. You just pull out the damaged drive and insert a new drive. The RAID device does all the work. With a RAID system you would always have duplicate copies of everything without having to remember to perform any back-ups. I have a friend of mine that has a RAID system at his home. His system is made by a company called Synology and holds five hard drives. He’s into the system for about $1,200, however, he has four drives that are each 12TB in size in a RAID set-up. He uses his system for movies, but it will work for any computer files or photos as well. Now, as I mentioned, I’m a little paranoid of losing photos so even if I had a RAID set-up at home like that, I would likely back up all of my photos onto another drive that I stored outside my home in case there was a fire or a flood or something. I don’t know how my friend deals with that issue, if at all.
As you can see, there are a multitude of different ways to back up your photos and store them long term. Depending on your finances and your technology abilities, you can design a system that works for you.
For filing purposes in my long-term storage, I have my photos grouped into folders by year. Inside each year, I have folders identified by date and activity photographed. For example, if I had shot photos on January 1, 2020 at the Rose Parade, I would have a file folder inside of the 2020 folder that is called 01.01.20 Rose Parade. That way my photo folders are automatically shown in chronological order by date and also have a description of what I photographed so that I can easily find the location of the photos that I am searching for at any time. I can also search the entire directory by word to find “Rose Parade” if I forgot what year but remembered the activity. The whole system is pretty simple and makes it easy to locate photos. It’s also a nice way to go through memories by looking in each year and seeing the activities I did each year.
Find a system that works for you and make sure you don’t lose any keepers. If you have any ideas, comments, or suggestions, feel free to add them below! I’ll look forward to hearing from you, and don’t forget to keep shooting!