The importance of backing up your photographs.

A photo’s purpose is far from finished once the shutter has been pressed — after all, if we never really look at our images, then what are they for and why have we gone to the effort to take them? Digital technology has made photography easier, allowing us to go ahead and take dozens of images to nail the perfect shot. But while digital is a great way to capture images, it’s not always the best way to store or display those moments.

And we know it’s so hard to know where to even start when backing up our photos from our phones, cameras and tablets etc. We have the opportunity now more than ever to produce quite the collection of photographs to back up.

Digital photography has many advantages over traditional film, but unfortunately, security isn’t really one of them. Unlike prints or negatives, digital images can be lost forever in a catastrophic hard drive failure, or even accidentally deleted with a few clicks of the mouse. Here are a few ways you can make sure those digital memories don’t vanish before their eyes.

Save and back up your files to more than one device/hard drive and also have them stored in more than one location. This way you’ll know if something happens to one copy at one location you will know you still have your precious files backed up at another location.
Also save and back up your files to an online cloud such as Dropbox, Google Drive or Microsoft OneDrive (there are so many options available now, just find one that suits you).
Print your photos because, in electronic form, pictures are only temporary enjoyment and physically printed photographs will last for many years to come.

And now a few tips on how to organise your back-ups!

Name your files - seems like a pretty simple and obvious start but make sure you name your files when importing them to begin with.
Use Folders - use Folders, Sub Folders and Sub-Sub Folders. It’s really up to you how specific you want to get when you are categorising images, but the more folders you have separating out unique events, trips, and projects, the more quickly you’ll be able to find a particular one that comes to mind. You could start with Year > Month > Event/Project etc. just make sure it makes sense to you!
Form Good Habits - Good organisation is about maintaining an organised workflow. You can go through every image in your collection right now and organise to your heart’s content, but if you don’t keep up with the next batch you upload (and the next, and the next) it’s not going to help you for long.
Start from Today - It can seem pretty overwhelming if you’ve got years’ worth of photographs uncategorised. So, start with getting your saving/back up workflow set up now and then work backwards. Don’t pressure yourself to do it all at once, take small steps and know you will get there!