Oh, so you just got married and have some super fab wedding photos and have no idea how to properly store said wedding photos?! Don’t worry – homegirl’s got your back! It’s super easy and equally as important.
Storing your wedding photos in our modern day world where nothing is printed (we’ll get to that later) is SO SUPER DUPER important – I can’t stress it enough. For that reason, there are four ways (and yes, you should do a bare minimum of at least three) I recommend you store your wedding photos:
1. A Cloud Service
I recommend this first and foremost because the cloud operates on technology that likely won’t be evolving too quickly – it’s something that’ll be around for awhile (just like your photos after reading and acting on all this info!!) You can utilize services like Google Drive (15GB free storage), Dropbox (free trial, after trial around $12.50/ month for 3TB), or iCloud for you Apple users (free for 5GB, then upward of $9.99 for 2TB).
Another great option for Amazon Prime users is taking advantage of their unlimited online storage of personal images – woohoo!!
2. Physical Hard Drive
You can utilize a thumbdrive (not recommended because of it’s small size – easy to lose) or an external hard drive. You can get these for quite cheap from any electronics store or Amazon. I store my images on a 2TB external hard drive that I got from Best Buy for about $55.
3. A Secondary Hard Drive
This could be your computer, a thumb drive that you keep in your bank safety deposit box (keep in mind this is the only time I personally recommend a thumb drive) or a secondary external hard drive. My general rule is that this needs to be the “oh shit!” hard drive that you have as back up when all else fails.
4. Physical Prints
This step has a win-win scenario going for it – while it’s nice looking at your photos on the computer, prints are even better. What’s more romantic than spreading them out on the floor with candles and a nice dinner and reminiscing with your honey?! In addition, it serves as just one more back up. Granted it’s not digital so you won’t be able to duplicate while preserving much quality, but you’ll have them, and that’s what’s important.
When considering where to print your photos – avoid the places that double as pharmacies or literally anything else besides printing. The colors WILL be off and it won’t look like the image you got in your gallery. I highly recommend printing directly from your gallery while it’s active or through Miller’s – they’re an industry favorite!
With something as important and meaningful as your wedding photos, I truly believe that it’s necessary to have back ups in different forms so that there is always an “oh shit!” option. You should never have to feel that gut-wrenching feeling of knowing that your wedding photos are gone forever.
For that reason, I also recommend that people include their wedding photos in their emergency evacuation plan – whether that means having an external hard drive in your document folder (preferably in a fire proof safe) or having them in a safety deposit box at your bank. You can never be too prepared.
Have questions? Let’s chat!
