Have you ever wondered what I do to protect your images? It’s a great question. After all, you spend a big chunk of change investing in a photographer. So what happens behind the scenes that ensures that you really will see pictures after your wedding or session? I’m going to let you peek at my process below!

1. I use two memory cards at all times

My camera, the Canon EOS R6, has two memory card slots. This means that when I take your pictures, I immediately have two copies of everything we shoot together. If something were to happen to one memory card, I have a second one that has the full resolution images.

After a shoot, I set these memory cards aside until your gallery is delivered. Just in case something happens with my other back ups, I still have all the original images.

2. As soon as I get home from a session, I make 3 back ups of your unedited images.

I have two solid state hard drives that I use to back up my images. This happens when I get home from a wedding or session. Right now I use Samsung portable hard drives, and I’m quite happy with them!

In addition to the physical back ups, I also save a copy of my images online. I use SmugMug Source. Things upload quickly, and the storage fees are extremely reasonable.

So, all of this means that once I get home from your wedding or session that I have 5 copies of your images.

3. Once your images are finalized, I make 3 more copies.

After editing, I upload your entire gallery back on to my hard drives. And, I upload your images to my online gallery website. I use Cloudspot, and this gallery serves as a digital back up.

So, after everything is finalized, there are 3 complete back ups to help provide more peace of mind.

4. How you can keep your images safe once you receive them from your photographer

• This may be able to go without saying, but download your images!
• Once your images are downloaded, have them saved in multiple locations. This can include your laptop, cell phone, and an online cloud based platform, like Google Photos, Apple Photos, etc.
• Print your images! If you think about it, this is a physical back up. If anything did happen to your digital files, you could always scan prints later on.

No system is fool proof. We can misplace hard drives, images can get damaged or lost, and files can corrupt. But the more back ups you have, the less likely you are to lose everything.

I hope this post gives you some ideas as well as some peace of mind! Over here at Christine Hazel Photography, I do all that I can to make sure that your images are safe!

Looking for more advice? Click here to see what I learned from choosing my wedding venue four times!

Want even more tips? Check out my advice on what to ask your wedding photographer!