How I Keep Your Photos Safe • RI Family Photographer
There are lots of questions I get asked as a RI family photographer. One that is asked very frequently, especially at session premieres, is “How long do you keep my photos?” There are many reasons people ask this, and they’re all good reasons. Often times people would like to purchase more prints, canvases, or albums down the road, as holiday gifts or for their own homes. I’ve also had more than one client ask me this because they or someone close to them have lost precious photos in a flood or fire, and they want to know if they’ll be able to replace those photos should something like that happen again.
No matter the reason for the question being asked, the answer is always, “I keep your photos forever.” This is sometimes an answer that is met with surprise, as not all photographers have this policy, but with me, you’ll always have access to your photos should you ever need them.
The digital age makes storing photos (and lots of other documents and files) very easy. We can put tons of photos on one tiny little hard drive. But electronics, including computers and hard drives, can and do fail.
So how do your photos stay safe with me?
By following photography best practices for image backup as well as storage and retention.
Just a few of the many hard drives that I use to back up clients’ photos.
First, your photos are backed up multiple times on my external hard drives. I’ve got multiple drives, and each client’s photos are backed up on two separate drives. Multiple copies on separate drives are a fail safe in case there is a problem or failure on one drive.
Second, I also use an off site cloud backup system to back up all drives, internal and external. This means that there is yet another copy of all your photos in a whole other location. This is yet another fail safe to protect your images in the event I unexpectedly had multiple hard drive failures at once, or there was some kind of incident or natural disaster that caused loss of all my data. Of course this is something that no person wants to think about, but the bottom line is that things happen. It’s important that your images are safe and available all the time, even in the event of a zombie apocalypse (hey, you never know…it could happen!)
The bottom line is that you as a client can always feel confident that your photos are safe with me, and will be available to you at any time. It’s important to you, so it’s important to me.