Today, Amber from Amber Marie Photography shares some advice on a topic we don’t often discuss: how to protect your precious wedding photographs.
Without wanting to strike fear into the hearts of couples everywhere, picture your happily married life (easy enough of course) is unexpectedly interrupted by a house fire, flash flood, burglary, house flattening earth quake or something as simple as hard drive failure. All of these entirely possible events could result in the total loss of your wedding photographs and albums forever.
Of course your wedding photographer might still have copies, but what if this loss happens five, ten or even fifteen years from now? Most photographers will be limited on the time they can store your photos simply because of the space and cost to catalogue an entire careers worth of wedding photos.
As a wedding photographer one of my worst fears is that something happens to any of my clients wedding photographs. To help eliminate sleepless nights worrying about my trusty external hard drives plummeting into their technological graves and taking years of my work with them, I’ve been researching the safest and most reliable ways to protect my wedding photography and here’s how you can too.
Ask for high resolution digital files
Whatever wedding photography package you book must, must, MUST make sure high resolution files are included. Even if you only want prints and an album. This ensures that if anything unthinkable happens to the physical photos, you can always reprint and replace them.
Print your favourite wedding photographs.
A home is a place to be happy, so adorn it with all your favourite moments and memories from the day. That way should the worst happen to your digital files you will have physical copies you can cherish.
Do NOT leave them on the USB or DVD album supplied.
Has anyone got a floppy disk I can borrow? tumbleweed rolls by Technology is ever changing and evolving and five to ten years down the line the beautiful wooden USB’s I supply to my clients may be totally obsolete and we might all be storing our photos in our google hats whilst zipping around on jetpack shoes. Well maybe not exactly like that, but even if you don’t intend to print your wedding photos or have an album made, you must download your photos onto an external hard drive, this will ensure that should you change your mind about an album or prints in a decades time you’ll still be able to access all your wonderful photos.
Back it up baby, back it up!
So you’ve adorned your house with beautiful prints? Check! To be extra safe with your digital files is to always have copies on two external devices, keeping one at a family member or friends house. This minimises the risk of losing your photos in the case of a house fire, flood or hard drive failure. Then for extra good measure cloud storage is the perfect peace of mind, so that if the worst really does happen and your physical photos and hard drives are destroyed your digital files are safely stored.
All images are taken by Amber.
