How I look after your wedding photos

I’ve just read a very sad blog post from a bride whose photographer lost most of her wedding photos – their hard drives fell to the floor and very few photos could be retrieved from either of them.  ( You can read it here if you like.) I can’t imagine what it would be like to have to tell a bride and groom that.  It’s definitely something that I never want to have to do, so  I want to assure my clients that I do everything I can to reduce the chances of it ever happening with the photos I take.  Here’s what I do to look after your precious wedding images and minimise the risk of losing them due to hard disk failure, fire or theft:

On your wedding day

• Both my assistant and I change memory cards regularly so your photos are recorded on several cards across the day to minimise the risk of losing all your images due to card failure.
• Both my main cameras take two memory cards so I configure them to write to both cards at the same time, which means I have duplicates of the images I take if one of the cards fails.
• As soon as I get home that night, I upload your images to my main hard drive.
• Once they’re all uploaded, I safely lock the memory cards away.
• When I go to bed, I leave my computer backing up your photos to a second hard drive.
• My automatic cloud backup  uploads them to an offsite location.

The following day and afterwards

• The second hard drive, which now has duplicate copies of your wedding photos, gets moved to another location in our house.
• The other memory cards stay with me when I go out of the house.  I don’t erase these cards until I’ve edited your wedding photos and uploaded the edited images to a second cloud backup location.
• My main computer and discs run off a UPS (uninterruptable power supply) so if there’s a power cut while I’m working on it, it minimises the chances of my photos getting corrupted.

So, as soon as possible after your big day, I have multiple copies of your images stored in multiple locations.

Once you’ve received your image files

I keep the originals files from the camera for a month afterwards and I keep copies of the edited images for a year after your wedding.  So once you’ve received your image files on disc or USB stick,  make sure you take backup copies of them.