When will your photos expire?
“If your photos do not exist in a minimum of two places, they have an expiration date, you just don’t know when it is.”
Meep. Hearing that for the first time might feel like someone just tossed a bucket of cold water on your face. The odds of losing your photos seemed like a remote risk, and shifting gears to view that loss as an inevitability might seem overly dramatic. But the more time goes by the more I realize that whatever computer I’m currently living on will eventually bite the dust and go the way of my ipod Mini... sitting in a dusty drawer until I can figure out how to recycle it. In the meantime, while my computer is still kicking, archiving digital photos requires intentionality.
Luckily, there are some really easy ways to backup your photos and memory is increasingly inexpensive. External Hard Drives are a simple way to save your photos in another place. There are cute little portable HD’s that plug into your computer, and then you simply drag and drop your images. There are loads of options out there, but one that we love for personal use is Western Digital’s Elements, 2TB for around $65. Keep in mind, Apple laptops are starting to discontinue USB ports so you will want to update your External Hard Drives along with your laptops, or another option is Cloud storage - things like Dropbox or Google Pictures.
One way to make the process less daunting is to narrow down all the images you take to the ones you really love the most right after you transfer them to your computer. Nobody wants to keep taking six shots of the same photo for EACH photo along with them for forever. If that sounds like you, we wrote a separate post to help you narrow down those images to the keepers that are most meaningful to you.
Even as professional portrait photographers, backing up our personal photos is a practice that takes intentionality. Backing up your photos is an important but often imperfect practice, which is why our studio is passionately print-based, to create beautiful legacy pieces to be passed down to your grandkids. But for all the little day-to-day joys that you are capturing, traveling adventures, investing time to intentionally backup your photos is so worth the peace of mind of knowing that these images will continue to tell your unique story for decades to come.