Keeping Your Wedding Memories Safe!

KEEPING YOUR WEDDING MEMORIES SAFE!

Guide to storing your wedding photos and videos!

Post by Christian for Natura Collective // New York City Wedding Photographer

If you’re a normal human you’re probably content with storing your wedding photos and videos in one spot, say a desktop computer or a USB drive. If you’re like me… you will probably store any important files in the following spots:

• Fireproof safe on a durable hard drive (physical)
• A copy on Dropbox (cloud)
• A copy on Google Drive (cloud)
• A copy on your desktop computer (physical)
• A copy on your laptop (physical)
• A cloud backup to a service like backblaze or crashplan (cloud)

THE MINIMUM RECOMMENDED STORAGE PLAN: 1 cloud service. 1 hard drive or USB in your home or at a safe place. 1 copy on your computer.

I completely understand that all of the above sounds totally psycho – but when it comes to your precious memories please don’t take it lightly! If you’re one of our wedding clients chances are we still have a copy of your files no matter when your wedding was. Don’t take that for granted though, always protect your files and have a plan in place for backups. We’ve heard the horror stories of houses or apartments burning down, or burglaries and computers being stolen.

The best best best plan is to have at least 3 copies of your important files, whether that’s related to your wedding photos or not! One physical copy at minimum and two separate cloud locations for the files, we recommend 2 google drive accounts, or a google drive account and dropbox account.

Natura Collective Photography Clients

So by now you definitely have your wedding and/or engagement photos. Step one… go to your Pic-Time or online link to the gallery we sent you via e-mail. Download ALL of the images, one copy in web size and one copy of the full gallery in high resolution or “original” file size. Now that you have a copy of that on your desktop, zip or compress those two folders inside of a folder named appropriately. Once the master folder is compressed, now upload that to dropbox, google drive, or another reliable online cloud service.

Once that upload is complete you can make some more physical copies, so spread those files around to multiple physical locations – a USB at your parent’s or family’s house as backup … or even a random USB you can stash in a drawer at home as backup. Then you’ll also want to leave a copy on your desktop computer or laptop (or both).

Boom – you’re all set – you have thoroughly protected your wedding photos! YAY!!!!

Don’t rely on us to keep your photos, who knows where or what we’ll be doing in 5, 10, or 20 years if you don’t follow these steps properly. We may or may not have access to your photos. Chances are yes we’ll have a copy, but just don’t count on that – it’s not worth the risk!!

Nature Collective Videography Clients

Most of our clients receive their wedding video files via Dropbox! Dropbox makes it super easy to transfer a copy of the video files right to your own dropbox account. If you don’t plan on using Dropbox, just download all of the files to your desktop or laptop computer and then upload them to your own cloud service. Once you have a copy safely stored in your own cloud please make sure you make one or two physical copies.

You should be able to squeeze all of the video files onto a 16 or 32 gigabyte usb drive. In some cases a 64 or 128 gigabyte drive will be necessary. Don’t forget to download a copy of your highlight or teaser video if it’s on Vimeo. You would have that link from us in your e-mail and/or texts! You can download the video right from that Vimeo link and add it to your files downloaded from the dropbox.

Due to the file sizes of videos – we cannot be held responsible for keeping copies on our dropbox for more than the contractually agreed upon timeframe. We really need our video clients to download and protect their memories as soon as possible. This is so so so important! 

DON’T WAIT A YEAR to go back to the dropbox link and download everything. In most cases we will leave the dropbox link available for download for about 1 to 2 months.

Thank you for coming to our TED talk, we are so thankful for each and every one of our clients. If you need any help preserving your memories please don’t hesitate to reach out! Hopefully we have helped you in the process of keeping your wedding memories safe.