The thought of losing your wedding photographs can lead to sleepless nights, especially when you are relying on your photographer to capture the memories of your special day. This where a professional wedding photographer stands out from an amateur one. Ask any wedding photographer about his/her biggest nightmare and a universal reply would be to loose images of a bride or the ceremony being shot. As we are entrusted with delivering the wedding photographs, capturing the memories, it is our responsibility to have backups and be prepared in case of any breakdowns or mishaps. We wanted to share our process of data and image management so that you can get a goodnight’s rest without having to stress about this. Make sure you ask your wedding photographer how they are protecting your wedding photos to avoid nightmares.
Here are a few tips on backing up and storing wedding photographs !
Wedding Photographers during the Wedding
All the top of the line wedding cameras come with card redundancy, although these cameras are more expensive but they have multiple card slots so in the worst case one card fails you have another memory card with duplicate cards.
Always shoot with two cameras – We always shoot with multiple cameras.
Shoot with smaller cards – Yes this is not very obvious but on wedding day, photographers are expected to be prepared for worst moments and it makes complete sense to photograph on big card so you don’t have change your cards during the day but we at our studio believe rather than having all of our eggs in one basket we are insuring our images. In case a card is lost or stolen for some reason, we have back-ups.
After the Wedding
Back-up Remplates
At our studio, we use back-up templates to ensure all cards are copied twice on two different drives. Sometimes you are copying the images and half of the card gets copied and half was discounted so we ensure same amount of images which were on the card are copied. We sign the document so there is accountability of who did the job and verification. Its more of a engineered way of making sure cards are backed up twice.
Server Backup
We are prepared for theft or fire. First things first your photographer should have liability insurance. We have purchased a reliable backup server which automatically backs-up data every day.
Don’t Keep all your Eggs in One Basket
At our studio, we have follow another backup trend, where we keep one hard drive till the images are delivered to a client in bank safe so that if there is a theft or fire we can always recover the data.
The world’s most reliable systems have failed, like airplanes with 99.97 % reliability due to human or technical failures. All we can do is try our best to reduce the probability of failure from our end and hope for the best.
Couple’s responsibility
Make sure after your photographer has delivered you images, you preserve them well. Best way to do that is by making an album. You should also download the images and save them on cloud space like google drive or dropbox and on a computer. Photographers have very little liability after the product has been delivered to the clients. Therefore its couples responsibility to make sure they have proper backups.
So this is where we invest our time and money as professional wedding photographers as we believe every picture is worth a million words!
Visit our Blog page for more insights on engagement and wedding day tips and tricks! Here is a blog for wedding photographers – LINK