WEDDING HINTS & TIPS | HOW I KEEP YOUR WEDDING PHOTOS SAFE
Intro
One part of the wedding photography process that some couples and some wedding photographers neglect, is the process for making sure that the wedding photos are backed-up in more than one location, ideally two or three locations.
In this blog post I’m going to talk you through my process, which ensures that I have all the bases covered, should the worst happen.
Backing Up Starts At The Wedding
I use three cameras on a wedding day and have another camera in the car incase one of my three main cameras goes down. All the cameras that I use on a wedding day (Sony A1’s, Sony A9ii or Sony A74) have dual card slots.
Why are dual card slots important? Simultaneous recording - each and every picture I take on a wedding day is recorded on both SD cards in the camera.
I find it amazing that some wedding photographers still use cameras with a single card slot; with the technology and the cameras we have now, why risk just one card slot? And the potential loss of all the wedding images.
Once I’m Finished On The Wedding Day
As mentioned in the intro, all my cameras write images to two SD cards; at the end of a wedding, I will have six SD cards full of images (two from each camera).
As soon as I have finished on a wedding day and as I am packing my camera bag to head home, I take an SD card out of each camera (slot 2) and place them in a card wallet; this card wallet is then placed in the glovebox of my car, whilst the other SD cards are kept in each camera.
If I am travelling a distance from the wedding to my studio on the evening of the wedding and I need to stop for refreshments, the camera bag, which contains my cameras and an SD card in each, comes with me. If my car were to be broken into while grabbing a drink or some food, I would still have a copy of the wedding images on me, as I still have a SD card in each camera.
In The Studio On The Evening Of A Wedding Day
Step 1 - Copying The Wedding Images To Two SSD Drives
Once I am home, and after a quick hello to the wife, the dog Rufus and Lily the cat, I head straight into the HQ studio to start the next step of making back-ups of the wedding images.
The first step in the HQ Studio back-ups starts with ingesting the wedding images via Photomechanic onto two SSD drives.
The first copy goes onto a portable SSD drive, which is the SSD that will be used for the full edit and any wedding photofilm or album workings.
Both SSD hard drives are kept in the studio, with the working SSD drive kept in a fireproof & waterproof safe when when not in use.
The second SSD copy is used for step two below.
Step 2 - Creating Smart Preview Files in Lightroom & Syncing To The Cloud
The second SSD drive copy is used to create Smart Preview files in Lightroom, after which the LR Catalogue with the Smart Preview Files will be ‘zipped’ and uploaded to one of my cloud providers.
The cloud backup is there for the worst-case scenario; the other four copies of the files have been lost or destroyed; I have never needed to use the cloud backup files and hope I don’t ever need to.
Why Smart Previews and not the full files?
The cameras that I use and the number of images I take on a wedding can result in me having anywhere between 300 GB - 700 GB worth of data from a wedding to upload a copy of each full-resolution file to the cloud (a 500GB wedding) would take around 2/3 days of constant uploading, no dropouts or time outs - uploading the full resolution files to the cloud isn’t feasible.
Smart Preview files take a 51mpx file and downsizes the file to around 2550 pixels along the longest edge (2-5mb); this size of file would still be perfect for editing and delivering to a couple, given that using these files would mean that something serious has happened (the other four copies of the files have been lost or destroyed).
Step 3 - Copies Kept In The Cars
As mentioned above, the moment I am finished on a wedding day, I place one SD card (slot 1) from each camera into a card wallet and is placed in my car. The second SD card stays in each camera until I arrive at the HQ studio, the SD cards (slot 2) are then backed up to two SSD, and a copy is placed in the cloud.
Once the above has been completed, the SD card (slot 2) is placed in another card wallet and in my wife's car.
Within 12 Hours Of Your Wedding I Have FIVE Copies Of Your Wedding Images Mixing Offsite & Onsite Back-Ups
A copy of the images are in my car (slot 1 SD card).
A copy of the images are in my wife’s car (slot 2 SD card).
A copy of the images on a workings SSD drive kept in a fireproof and waterproof safe when not in use.
A copy of the images on a SSD raid drive in the HQ studio.
A copy of the images are saved in the cloud.
What Happens After Delivery Of Your Full Wedding Gallery?
Only once I have delivered the full gallery do I start to remove the back-ups of the images and make final archive copies of the delivered images.
My archive copies of all delivered wedding images look like this:
Final .jpg files uploaded to my HQ client gallery system (the way I deliver my wedding galleries to couples)
Final .jpg & .RAW files for delivered images are uploaded to my online archive.
Final .jpg & .RAW files for delivered images are archived to my HQ studio NAS drive.
Final .jpg & .RAW files for delivered images are archived to a secure hard drive held in a fireproof & waterproof safe in an external garage.
Wrapping It Up
So, that’s my wedding photography backup process, from the moment I back up at the end of a wedding to what happens after I deliver the full wedding gallery.
The key thing to take away from this blog post, you can never have too many copies of the wedding images. Speaking to many other wedding photographers, they all pretty much say that I go overboard and don’t need to worry and have so many copies. Still, for me, I’d rather have too many copies of the wedding images than not enough.
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