7 Tips for Storing Your Digital Wedding Photos Forever

7 Tips for Storing Your Digital Wedding Photos Forever

Can you imagine losing ALL of your precious wedding photos, forever?

Well, if you’re storing your photos on a USB stick, an external hard drive, or on your own PC for that matter, losing them sooner or later – due to hardware failure or viruses – could become a very real possibility!

If you don’t have the time to read everything in this post, the really simple answer is to set up your own CLOUD storage – something like Dropbox, Amazon, Google Drive, or any other popular cloud storage service should work.

Or you my cloud where I keep your photos safe:

ONLINE CLOUD STORAGE PRICE

Even Google boss Vint Cerf has warned: 

Print out your most treasured photos or risk losing them!

In February 2015, Dr Cerf also mentioned that as operating systems and software are updated, documents and photos stored on old technology, such as out of date PCs or storage, can easily become inaccessible.

Corrupted files due to hardware failure on USB sticks or hard drives can happen more often than you’d think.

As a wedding photographer, I’ve unfortunately seen things like this happen more than once. So, if you’d like a tiny bit of friendly, professional advice:

DO NOT USE JUST A USB OR YOUR COMPUTER TO STORE YOUR WEDDING PHOTOS!!!

The Simplified Solution to Keeping Your Wedding Photos Safe

There is a solution though if you want to avoid losing your cherished wedding photos…

If you don’t have the time to read everything in this post, the really simple answer is to set up your own CLOUD storage – something like Dropbox, Amazon, Google Drive, or any other popular cloud storage service should work.

As your photos are VERY high resolution, you’ll likely need around 15GB – 20GB of storage space in order to store ‘Full-Size’ photo files. At the time of writing this post, Dropbox costs €9.99/month – in my opinion, a small price to pay to keep your wedding memories safe!!

If you prefer NOT to have to worry about these technical details, however, at DK Photo, I offer backed-up cloud storage for my couples, all for the low fee of €3 per month. 

For this small price, I will back up and store ALL of your wedding photos on my own professional cloud account.

This is something many clients choose, particularly if they feel like they’re not quite technical, or if they’d like to take the stress out of safely backing up their wedding photos.

If you’d like to find out more about storing your own wedding photos, then read on!

7 Tips for Storing Your Digital Wedding Photos Forever

Just in the last few weeks, several people have got in touch with me because they’d either lost their USB with their wedding photos, found out that the USB wasn’t working, or they’d lost their own digital copies on their computer.

Unfortunately, the reality is that most people first have to suffer the awful loss of precious photos in order to then take the precautions needed to ensure it never happens again!

Now, as a (possibly ‘overly’ careful!) professional myself, I keep digital copies of ALL my wedding photos on my hard drive, while also making multiple backups of them on the cloud! The truth is though that we also need to face the reality that digital images can disappear in seconds, sometimes never to return.

So, with that in mind, here are my 7 tips for successfully storing your own digital wedding photos, forever!

The worst-case scenario of storing your wedding photos long-term on a USB memory stick.

Your wedding photos are a time portal back to one of the happiest days of your life and it’s so important that you keep them safe for years to come for this exact reason. Nowadays, most people receive their wedding photographs digitally as opposed to having them printed, and they tend to then save them on their laptops or on a USB.

However, if this is all you do, you’re at risk of losing access to them forever – something that happens a lot more often than people realise!

There are many ways that you can reduce this risk – in this blog post I’m going to take you through some best practice tips to ensure you always have access to your precious wedding photographs.

The Importance of Image Resolution

Before I move fully into the process of safely saving your photographs, it’s really important that you first understand the importance of their quality.

Image resolution is one of the most important aspects of digital photos, especially wedding photographs. Each of your photographs is made up of thousands of pixels. The amount of these pixels determines the quality of the photograph, or in technical terms, the resolution.

Your wedding photographer’s photographs of your big day will be much higher in resolution than those photos taken on your sister’s phone for example, so it’s really important to understand that how you save your images will reflect on the quality of the long term – this includes both your high-resolution and low-resolution photographs.

Many people upload their photographs to a Facebook album in the hopes of having access to them for years to come, but did you know that on upload that your photos are reduced in size and resolution by Facebook? This means that the high-quality images you’ve uploaded to the site are no longer the same high-quality images you get back if you then download them again. This is very important to note when saving your files.

The number one rule of successfully backing up your wedding images is: Do not think that creating a Facebook album is a good backup!

Keep on reading to learn how to properly and safely store your wedding photos forever.

Backup, backup, backup – Immediately!

Believe it or not, most people think that having one copy of their wedding photos is enough to have them forever. However, this is wrong! When you receive the finished photos from your photographer, be sure to make multiple copies of them straight away!

The fact of the matter is that people lose their most important photos each and every day when USBs or hard drives break, when their electronics are stolen, or when online services go out of business or shut down.

There’s no one ‘magic bullet’ solution, but by backing your photos up in many different ways, it’s already a good start to having access to them for a longer period of time.

In case you forgot, I also offer my own back up service

Go ‘Old School’ and Print Your Photos

Digital photographs don’t actually exist in the real world.

This is a fact that can be pretty hard to grasp because if we can see them, they must exist, right? Well, no! For this very reason, while it seems ‘Old School’, I highly recommend getting all of your photographs printed.

To make it even more special, you could even make it a fun post-wedding activity for you and your partner to select and place them into a scrapbook or homemade album. After all, a homemade wedding memory that you can actually hold in your hands is always going to be lovely to look back on in the years to come.

To add to this, while you’re printing your photos, it’s also a nice idea to get some doubles printed of your favourites so that you can give to your parents, family members, friends, etc. This makes a very thoughtful and sentimental gift, but also acts as a great way to ensure more copies of your most loved photos exist physically in this world!

Have a look at my own options to print your photos by simply clicking on one of these links below.

Order a Printed Wedding Album or just print photos

There’s nothing more special than your very own wedding album.

The tradition of having a formal wedding album created has been done for many, many years and to this day, it still stands the test of time as a key milestone in celebrating your marriage.

Whilst to some, they may seem like an unnecessary expense, wedding albums are timeless and the best way to have your most treasured memories displayed for many, many years.

Check out my most popular wedding album options here:

Invest in Cloud Storage

While all of the above are great steps to ensure that your wedding photos last throughout the years, the best thing you can do digitally in order to keep your wedding photos safe, is to invest in cloud storage.

Now, I know that cloud storage comes with a recurring monthly or yearly fee, but with that, you also get the invaluable peace of mind that your photographs are safe and that you can access them on any device, at any time, using secure login details.

Popular cloud options include Apple iCloud, Amazon Drive, Google Drive, and Backblaze, but just remember that by subscribing to these services yourself, that you’ll have to do all of the uploadings, saving, backups, etc. yourself!

If you’d prefer to not have to worry about these technical details though, at DK Photos, I offer cloud storage for all of my couples at the reasonable fee of just €3 per month.

By subscribing to this package, I will backup and store ALL of your wedding photos on my own professional cloud account.

This is what many of my clients choose to do if they feel they’re not quite technical, or if they’d like to take the stress out of safely backing up their wedding photos.

Was your Wedding 3, 5, or even 10 years ago?

If your wedding was many years ago but you’d still like to invest in cloud storage, I can also help you! Just retrieve the images ASAP from your USB – or wherever you’ve stored them – make another copy, and then contact me. I’d be delighted to set up your cloud storage gallery!

Remember: you invested in your wedding photos so that you can mark and relive your special day, so please consider the possibility that they could be lost forever, at any time. I believe that it’s so important to limit any risks to your precious memories, so hopefully, the points above will help you to save them so that you can enjoy them for many years to come!

Even Google boss Vint Cerf has warned: 

Print out your most treasured photos or risk losing them!

In February 2015, Dr Cerf also mentioned that as operating systems and software are updated, documents and photos stored on old technology, such as out of date PCs or storage, can easily become inaccessible.

Backing up photos on multiple drives and discs may be fine for the short term, but digital storage eventually suffers from ‘data rot’, and stored directly in the cloud yourself with Google, Amazon, etc. is pricey – as well as that, these companies may not be around in the coming decades.

Dr Cerf also warned that vast amounts of digital information may soon be lost in a new digital “dark age”, so, to ensure the long-term survival of important photos, it’s essential to print them out physically and keep the prints in a safe place.

That’s why I strongly recommend that people make sure to order a wedding photo album so they have all of their best wedding photos printed out.

To suit all customers, I offer several types of albums at different prices. They’re very affordable, and will cost you less than paying for cloud storage!

If you have any questions about cloud storage, printing, or ANYTHING related to wedding photography, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with me today!

For those more ‘technical” people – here’s an interesting video on cloud storage: