Backing up Your Wedding Day Images

April 27, 2020

Backing up Your Wedding Day Images

It is so important that you take backing up your wedding day images, or any images for that matter seriously. Back in the day digital images were not a thing. In order to see your photos you would have to shoot a roll of film, develop it and then you would have physical copies of those images and you would be given back a physical copy of your negatives to make copies in the future if you wished.

Nowadays (most of) our images are electronic, typically stored on electronic devices, and while this is pretty amazing, there are also a lot of downfalls to this. Technology has been known to fail and if you don’t properly back up your images it’s very easy to lose all of your files. Typically your photographer will keep your files on hand for a certain amount of time, but it’s always best not to depend on this and to take action immediately after receiving your images so you know they are safe and sound for years to come.

The most important thing we preach is not to put all of your eggs in one basket! Don’t depend on one backup plan, especially for really important photos like the ones from your wedding day. Below we will go over 3 easy ways to keep those memories safe for years to come.

1. Save copies on a USB or External Hard drives:

This is one of the easiest ways to back up your images. You can pick external hard drives up at your local Wal-Mart, Staples, Best Buy even shoppers and they are typically pretty inexpensive too. We highly recommend copying your images to at least two different drives and then keeping one or two at different locations other than your house. Keep one at your office, at a family members house, or anywhere safe. God forbid something terrible happens at your house like a break in, a fire, flood etc. and you lose what you had backed up there. The more places you have your images store the safer they will be.

We recommend the following brands for external hard drives:

WD My Passport
Seagate Backup Plus

2. Cloud Service:

Backing your images up to the cloud is a very easy, cheap and solid solution to keeping your files safe. Like mentioned before, technology fails, crazy things such as fires and floods happen and physical drives can be destroyed. A cloud service adds an extra step of security. it’s easy to connect your computer, phone, tablet etc. to these services to keep all of your photos professional and non-professional safe.

Awesome (cheap or free) cloud services you can use are:

iCloud
Dropbox
Amazon Drive
Google Drive

3. Investing in Print + Albums:

Unfortunately, printing our images is not nearly as common as it used to be. There is something so magical about seeing a photo printed for you to hold in your hands, hang on your wall and send in the mail with your christmas cards to your relatives. Printing your photos is a great way to preserve your memories, and in most cases is even better than storing electronically. How amazing is it when you stumble across an old photo album or box of photos of when you were a kid or when your parents and grandparents were growing up. It’s pretty incredible really.

In our personal opinion, printing your photos is definitely the best way to back up your images.

Think about how quickly electronics go obsolete, how many people can you think of that have a VCR or a stereo that plays cassettes? Prints don’t require you to have to keep transferring your files to new technology or worrying about your computer or hard drives crashing because you will have physical copies you can hold in your hands. Of course it’s SOO important to back up your images like we mentioned above FIRST, BUT printing is the most timeless way to pass down these memories for generations to come, and bonus there is no subscription or password needed to access the files!

If you are our client, you can order prints, albums and other amazing products direct from our gallery Pic-Time gallery that we deliver our images on.

These prints are of the highest quality and are printed here in Canada so there is no need to worry about taxes or duties coming over the border. If you are located here locally in Halifax (or in Nova Scotia) and you want to print your files on your own, we highly recommend doing so online or in store at Atlantic Photo Supply. They have a few different locations and offer great quality prints and products. If you are looking to order some prints from your past event, please don’t hesitate to contact us about this! We are so passionate about people printing their images.

We hope we have convinced you how important backing up your wedding day images really is.

This doesn’t just apply to your wedding day images, this applies to ALL of your images! Family photos, engagement photos, vacation photos, cell phone photos, photos of your children, Every. Single. Photo. That belongs to you, because you really never know when an image that seems like nothing will all of a sudden mean everything to you. It’s really not as daunting as it seems and you will be forever grateful that you did this if anything ever happens to that one basket that you depended on.