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Photographers: Backup Your Images |
By:
Bob Kahn |
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I recently read a little "advertisement" in one of our major industry publications. The premise of the advertisement was how wonderful the company's insurance is.
Insurance against non-preventable accidents and disasters is one thing, but insurance to cover photographers who are not professional enough to carefully make backups of his clients' images is something else. Something that in my opinion encourages irresponsibility.
I immediately sent an email off to the organization that sponsored this ad, "blasting" them for not reprimanding this photographer for his lack of "Professionalism". I think somewhere in my letter I used the word "stupid".
Let's stop and think about what happened.
What would make a professional wedding photographer take such a cavalier attitude towards the images from his client's once in a lifetime event? Was it too much bother to backup the images?
I'm sad to say that this situation of a photographer not backing up his clients' precious images is not all that uncommon. Unfortunately, it goes on all the time.
If you started in the photography business when we were still using film, you know the fears we lived with all the time. We all had different ways to try and store our negatives against loss. Fire was the biggest fear.
You never know what kind of natural or accidental disaster will happen. A friend of mine who lived in an area that had never before seen any significant flooding, woke up one morning to find all his negatives under water due to a freak storm.
I personally experienced a fire in my studio. I stored my negatives in plastic containers in case the sprinklers went off, if there was a fire. My plan worked. It was Christmas season, my neighboring office had a party and forgot to turn off the coffee maker. 3AM, a fire started. The sprinklers kicked in and all was well.
My plastic containers saved all the negatives and all my albums.
Now with digital images, we can make multiple copies of our precious "negatives", and store them in different locations.
Here is the way to store your images:
1.Weddings:
Don't "move" your images from your memory card to your computer, but "copy" them. Do whatever renumbering or organizing that is necessary, then make 2 or 3 copies of your organized images on CD's or DVD's.
Take the copies and put them in another building, or 2 different buildings. If it is the middle of the day and you can't bring them to another building, leave them in your car, as long as the car is not in a garage attached to your studio.
If you have a studio outside your home, then bring a copy of the images home with you at night. If you have a friend or relative in town, leave a set of images in their home.
If your studio is in a storm prone area, it would be best to make arrangements to ship your image copies to a friend or relative in another city or state.
How hard would that be? Make your copies, put them in a CD mailer, and take a walk to the mailbox and drop it in.
I don't know the mathimatical probabilites, but I bet they are about 10 million to 1 that you and your friend in another state could have a catastrophic incident the same day.
Storing copies of your images in multiple locations is so easy today, that there's no excuse for not doing it.
2. Portraits
Unlike weddings, portraits are not such a once-in-a-lifetime event. However, your portrait images should also be backed up and saved. The need for speed, though, is not quite so critical. I usually save up the CD's from several portrait sessions, and then send a batch of them to my off site locations.
Not to say that you should not take some precautions against your computer having a crash and you could loose all of your images before you had a chance to back them up.
So, try this idea. Purchase an "auxiliary" hard drive. You can buy them in any office supply store, or online. They are "cheap". 100 Gig's of storage might cost under $100.
Plug the auxiliary drive into your computer's USB or firewire port and you'll be able to immediately copy your images to the drive.
Now, after each portrait session, take one extra minute after copying your images to your main computer hard drive, and drag the folder of images to your external drive. They will actually "copy" to the auxiliary drive, leaving the images on your main drive untouched.
That copy of your portrait session images on your external drive will be a life saver if your computer crashes.
3. Off Premises Storage
If you are relying on online storage for backup of your images, I'd recommend not relying on that alone. Companies can change hands, natural disasters can affect the company storage facility, and no end of possible troubles could make well-intentioned promises impossible to keep.
What do you really know about their storage facilities? Have you visited their site?
If you need a place to store your images off site, read on.
We will start a "back up" exchange on my blog. Find details here: http://www.prophotohelpdesk.com
Get the inside scoop on the science of posing and lighting guaranteed to produce flattering pictures and happy customers from Master Photographer Bob Kahn atPro Photo Help Desk, the blog for professional photographers. Get your own completely unique content version of this article.
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Article Source: http://www.statssheet.com/articles/article54169.html |
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