Storage Solutions for Your Photos

I have to thank my younger brother for the topic of this blog post–he suggested I write about where/how I store all of my photos. It’s a good question, not just for professional photographers, but for everyone who has a digital camera and takes a lot of pictures. These days, instead of shoeboxes full of 4×6 prints and negatives, we have computer hard drives overflowing with photos from Christmas 2006, summer trip 2008, and graduation week 2010. Yeah, apparently the milestones of life occur only in even years.

So, imagine how many photos you have on your hard drive, and multiply that by 10 or more for me. I’m regularly taking around 75 GB (gigabytes) of photos at EVERY wedding. That adds up pretty quickly. How do I keep from drowning in files and running out of hard drive space? Well, there’s more than one answer to this question.

Here’s the thing, when you begin to think about storing your photos, you have to consider two things: short-term storage vs. long-term storage. How long you want to store your photos will determine what kinds of storage solutions you use. Let’s start with short-term storage.

Short-term storage is anything from a few days to about a year. These are images you recently took and are waiting to edit, upload to a website, create an album, and/or share with family and friends. Obviously, quick access is key to short-term storage. You don’t want to be digging for a DVD of images every time you need to access them. At the same time, you need to be assured that you’re not going to loose all of your photos if your hard drive crashes. And it will. Trust me. Hard drives like to crash. It’s only a matter of time before yours goes kaput.

So, you need some sort of system of redundancy, where your photos are backed-up in more than one place. For mac uses, I’ve heard the Apple time machine can be a good solution of automatically backing up your files, though there’s still the risk that the external hard drive will fail. And then there’s the Apple Time Capsule, which wirelessly backs up your files. But the biggest storage you can get is a 2TB (terabyte), which sadly, probably won’t cut it for most professional photographers who are regularly working with thousands of gigabytes of photos. At this point, you’re looking into multiple external hard drives and some sort of RAID system that will automatically spread your data across multiple drives to minimize the risk of a drive failing. If you’re fairly good with this sort of thing, I’m sure you can figure out a good system to rig, but if you’re like me, who doesn’t have time to figure out what kind of hardware and systems I need, then a Drobo might be the best solution for you.

Drobos use a proprietary system of backing up your data which allows for the failure of several hard drives without the loss of any data. Sweet. All you need to do is get some hard drives, load them into the Drobo, format everything, and start using it for all of your short-term storage needs. It’s that simple. The Drobo handles all the rest of the complicated backing up stuff. This is the solution I use for my short-term storage needs. Of course, I bought my Drobo several years ago, and they have since come out with even bigger and better products, so you’ve got lots of choices in terms of storage size. I currently have about 4 terabytes of usable storage (using about 8 terabytes worth of drives). Because it’s a redundant system, you will end up with about half of the storage capacity of the drives you use. It’s a small price to pay for peace of mind. In fact, I did have a hard drive failure last year. But it was a piece of cake to fix. All I had to do was take out the defective drive and put in a new one. Woila! No files were lost, and I was up and running again in no time.

Here’s a photo of my lovely Drobo…and if you look closely, you’ll see a layer of dust underneath it. Nice.

But, that kind of system isn’t going to store my photos for years. Even if I bought the biggest Drobo and stuffed it with lots of terabyte drives, one day, I’d run out of space. Besides, I don’t really need to pull up someone’s wedding from 2007 on a regular basis. What kind of solutions are there for long-term storage? Well, there is the old burn a DVD of images…but I honestly think that’s a very poor system. Who knows if we’ll even be using DVDs in 10 years? Of course, it’s impossible to know for sure what turns technology will take and what will be around in 20 years, but I have a feeling that the internet, in some form or another, will still be around. Not to mention, I think the days of the home computer as we know it are limited. You want a long-term storage solution that will give you access to your photos from anywhere in the world.

Clearly, that’s an online storage system, which is exactly what I use. Disregarding the funny name, Smugmug is a great photo sharing and storage website, of which I’ve been a pro member since 2006. Of course, there are plenty of photo sharing and storage websites out there, like flikr, snapfish, and google’s picasa, and they might work great for the average consumer photographer who’s just taking photos of their family, but I don’t think they’re good solutions for professional photographers. The only exception may be flickr, but then you need to buy a pro account to have unlimited storage. And just between you and me, I hate flickr’s layout…it’s so cumbersome to try to look through photos. Not to mention, it’s easy for anyone to copy your photos for free.

With a professional account with Smugmug, though, you get unlimited storage, an incredible array of privacy options, the option to upload and store videos and RAW files, and incredible customer service. I not only use Smugmug for my online proofing, but I also use it for my long-term storage. Once I’ve finished a wedding and delivered all of the products to the client, including their DVD of images, I delete all of their photos from my Drobo, keeping only an online copy of all the high-res jpegs. I’m sure you could ask, “Well, what if Smugmug’s servers permanently fail and you loose all of your photos?” In that case, yeah, I’d loose all those photos…but honestly, I’m not too worried about that. I’ve already fulfilled my contract at that point. As for my personal files, yeah, I’d be disappointed to lose those, but again, the photos most important to me I have in other places, ie, in picture frames in my house. In the end, you’re going to have to accept some risk…even storing hundreds of DVDs of photos in bank safe doesn’t guarantee you’ll never loose those photos.

One more anecdote–when I was traveling this spring and doing several shoots, I used my MacbookPro for editing. When finished, I immediately uploaded all the photos to the website. In an unfortunate turn of events, my Macbook got some tea spilled on it and it basically got fried. What if that had been the only place where I stored those photos? I’d have been in trouble. Fortunately, I had them all on Smugmug, so I simply downloaded them again to my home computer and created a DVD of the images for the client. No skin off my teeth.

In conclusion, when thinking about your storage needs, you need to consider short-term vs. long-term solutions and have good systems for both.