How to Store and Back Up Your Wedding Photos
Today’s blog topic isn’t very “sexy,” but it’s an important one! When I deliver your gallery once the wedding is over, and I’m finished editing, I do so via an online gallery system called Pixieset. Here is an example of a full gallery that a client receives: https://rakoteetphotography.pixieset.com/g/camandchelseigh/. When you enter the gallery, it will walk you through how to favorite, share, print, and download the images. You can download your photos with a special password that I send to you, and of course, you are free to share you gallery and password with friends and family. When you download your images, you can download in high resolution, which is best for printing, as well as web size, which is best for sharing on social media. Your gallery will remain online for 6 months after delivery to allow plenty of time for downloading and ordering prints if you wish to purchase any prints through my professional lab (you also have a print release and can print wherever you would like). After those six months, it’s up to you to store and back up the photos in order to save them for the rest of your lives and for future generations.
When downloading the high resolution files, they may be too large to fit on your computer. I recomend storing them on an external hard drive. Here are the ones I use: https://amzn.to/2SCsZdl. If you don’t need 4 TB of space, this one might work better for you: https://amzn.to/2C0SygZ. I recomend purchasing two of these, and backing up your photos in multiple locations, because you can never be too careful with your wedding photos, and sometimes technology fails (I am crazy about backups). You’ll also want to store your photos on the cloud in case anything were to physically happen to the hard drives, such as a house fire or a break in. Google drive is probably the easiest way to use cloud storage. You won’t be able to fit all of your wedding photos in the amount of space that google offers you for free, but it’s relatively cheap to purchase additional storage.
I recomend downloading both the high resolution and web size versions of the photos, and saving them to two external hard drives AND cloud storage. You’ll want these photos to last for generations, and this is the best way you can make sure that happens.
Although today’s blog topic wasn’t as fun as normal, I hope it was helpful! If you have any questions about storing and backing up your wedding photos, feel free to leave them in the comments below or email directly here.