Regular photo archiving - a security issue

Each avid photographer takes many pictures that may be financially or purely sentimental. Whether photography is your hobby or you live from it, it is worth taking an interest in various ways of archiving photos and making backups. How do you do that? Why?

Why bother creating photo archives and backups?

If the photographs you take are stored only in digital form and in one place (for example, in the camera's memory or on a computer), they may be irretrievably lost. This can happen either when the equipment is stolen or destroyed, or even when it undergoes a more serious breakdown. Nothing is eternal and reliable, so it is worthwhile to archive and back up your photos on an ongoing basis, so that one day you don't regret that the only copy of a photo from a trip to the other end of the world was lost due to a computer failure or theft.

Archiving and storage of photos and documents can be organized locally or you can use one of the many online solutions that allow you to store data in the cloud. The microsd card can hold a limited number of photographs, but is a reliable and tangible medium. Nevertheless, it is worth considering keeping one copy of the photos on the card and the other one on a chosen server or somewhere else.

How to store a photographic archive?

Whether our photos are holiday souvenirs or professional shots, which are the basis for our work, it is worth tidying them up and copying them to protect against their loss. It is well known that memories and moments experienced are more important, but it would be difficult to come to terms with the loss of the archive of photographs from the period of the birth of a child or from recent meetings with people who have already passed away. These are situations that can happen and which can be effectively prevented, as long as we take care to copy and store the photos properly.

One of the proven ways to archive images is to store them on your computer. To ensure that your images are not lost in the event of a hardware failure, consider additional storage in the cloud or on an external drive. An additional archive space is an additional guarantee of securing valuable photographs. The external drive is a great offline solution - just right for people who are worried about file security in the cloud. The portable drive can be refilled from time to time and then stored in a safe place.

If our photo archive is really large, it is worth thinking about buying space on the server. This is an alternative to cloud-based file storage services, which will allow you to both store files on the network and place any website, domain, mail or blog on the server.

It is important not only to make backups, but also to keep the pictures in order

Once you've taken care of the safe storage of your files, it's worth thinking about how to rip them from your camera and how to organize them. Be careful not to overwrite the photos when dropping them on the disk (which is possible if you change the settings in the camera or in the program that copies the photos and file names are repeated). To help you get a very large archive of files, there are special programs for photographers, which are used both to rip photos, as well as to catalog them, and even for digital pre-processing. Solutions of this type are especially useful for professional photographers who work on RAW files.

Sometimes you have to make a sharp selection

In the past, when photography required the use of a film roll, and it was quite expensive to develop photos and make prints, not so many photos were taken. In many cases, one or two rolls of photographs were brought from the holiday, giving up to several dozen shots. Nowadays, everything has changed. We photograph everything, everywhere and almost all the time. We share photos on the web, publish them on blogs, social networking sites or send them in private messages, and this makes us collect and archive a lot of photos. In fact, most of them will not be needed for anything in the future, and the memory of a tasty breakfast a few days ago does not require storing a few photographs of this meal. In order not to drown in the excess of photographs and similar shots, it is worthwhile to make a sharp selection of the collected photographs from time to time. The more often we do this, the greater the order in the photographic archive.

Photography is for many people a passion, pleasure or even a way of life. Photos and images surround us from all sides. More and more often we take pictures in everyday, ordinary situations to capture or show something to others. This is encouraged by social media and the fact that everyone takes pictures and shares them. Whether we take pictures for pleasure or for profit, we should make sure that they are properly archived and stored so that the most important shots are not lost irretrievably.

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