Your wedding is over and you’ve just seen all the images from your wedding. You are stoked to be getting the disc of the images any day now and you have so many plans of what you are going to do with the pictures.
Before you start printing or scrap booking, I suggest you think of long term storage and backup all these memories.
The best, most useful backup of your wedding images will be to make prints or have an album made. This way the images are actually visable and ready to be enjoyed by you instead of just on a drive somewhere!
Also, keep in mind that while a DVD or a USB drive is perfect technology today, in 20, 30 or 50 years, it will be archaic and not understood technology. Imagine if your parents got their photos back on a floppy disk and then didn’t do anything about them to showcase or preserve them? You’d see the floppy disc in a drawer, not know what was on it and go ahead and just chuck it… along with all the memories!
When you receive your images on a DVD, I suggest backing them up immediately. It only takes a couple of scratches to make a DVD unreadable from your computer. I’m sure you all remember those irritating glitches in your favorite CD way back when. Makes the song unlistenable (yep, that’s a word…) and it will be the same for your images.
Because of the unreliability of DVDs I have chosen to go the route of delivering images on USB drives. These also need to be backed up so you don’t accidentally delete the drive and lose all your images.
So open up that package, revel at the prettiness and excitement of being able to go through and really look at all the images from your day, but before you start, drag the images onto your computer or external hard drive, then take the disc from your photographer, repackage it up and place it someplace safe.
Some place it won’t get lost but it also won’t accidentally be scratched and rendered unusable, or deleted.
Then use the copies of the jpgs that are on your computer to order any prints and to upload to Facebook or email to your parents.
If anything happens to your hard drive or your computer then you have the backup of your original hidden away.
The next step, which most won’t do, but you should, is to have an off site place where you also have backups of the images.
Remember, this is important because your photographer won’t necessarily always have your images till the end of time. I have in the contract my clients sign that I will retain a copy for two years after their wedding. The responsibilty of your wedding images lies in your hands!
There are plenty of ways to have offsite copies of your images.
You can :
- burn a back up disc and keep it at your parents house.
- Sign up for services like iCloud or Dropbox or Backblaze in which you can download your images to an online service and can access them anywhere.
This is of great use if your house catches on fire, or more likely, some pesky thief comes and decides that your computer will be better off theirs than yours.
Digital images are amazing in many ways, but never be lazy and forget to backup!
It takes only a couple of minutes and will save you years of anguish and heartbreak if something goes wrong!
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