Five ways to save your images

It used to be that brides and grooms would save their images in one way — a wedding album. That has changed.

Now it seems many couples aren’t getting the photo albums but they want the digital images sent to them. Then what do they do with them? I’m not really sure but I suspect many of those images are sitting on hard drives around the state of Nebraska.

Here are my top five suggestions for ways to save your images.

Photo album

It may seem old-fashioned, but albums still have a place in today’s wedding photography industry. It is a great keepsake and the best way to look at your wedding photos. It seems reasonable to assume that most couples will keep their album in a special place and they won’t lose it. Looking through a photo album is in my opinion the easiest and most enjoyable way to see those images again.

Cloud storage

At the very minimum, everyone should save their precious photos in the cloud. I realize some may not understand this concept, but I would be happy to explain it. Basically it’s like a permanent storage off-site that you will never lose. Dropbox, Google Drive and Amazon Drive are some of the cloud-storage services that I use and like. It’s easy to upload photos to the cloud, and even if a fire were to break out or your computer hard drive crashed, you won’t lose the photos.

External hard drives

These handy drives are great places to store your photos. But they shouldn’t be the only place. Put your photos on at least one external hard drive, preferably two. Then keep the hard drive in a safe location where it won’t be disturbed. Hard drives can go bad. I’ve had one go bad on me and I lost many past photos.

Flash drives

Flash drives are perhaps the easiest way to store photos, but it’s not the best. Here’s why. Just this past week I got a call from a past client who had a wedding video my company did for her on a flash drive and a DVD. She said she went to play the video and neither device worked. She was very worried she had lost her wedding video. Thankfully, we were able to provide it for her — in a cloud-based link sent to her. I urged her to store the videos in her own cloud-based storage system for safe keeping. The good thing about flash drives is that they are, as I said, easy to use and easy to safe. But they go bad, and even if they don’t you stand the risk of losing it. Those small little suckers can easily slip out of site.

Discs

Just like flash drives, discs in the form of CDs or DVDs can go bad. They sit around and for whatever reason get corrupted and won’t play. Plus, fewer and fewer computers even play these discs. This is why we no longer provide discs.

The bottom line is this — save your images in as many ways and places as you can. I always tell this to my clients. Go ahead and keep them on a flash drive, but also put them on an external hard drive and by all means — store them in the cloud!