As a professional photographer, you need a dependable system for preserving and managing your portfolio. Sure, you could store your most important work in a physical format and keep it in long-term storage, like a hard drive — or even an album or print. However, in today’s digital age, this is only useful for backups. Your actual portfolio should be kept in a digital format to reduce the risk of it being damaged or lost. Of course, you can still have tangible copies of your photos — but bear in mind that they’re more susceptible to loss or damage. With this in mind, we’ll discuss safe ways to store your crucial portfolio photos — both digitally and physically.
What Are Safe Backup Options?
If you make your living as a photographer, losing your portfolio photos could seriously derail your career. However, it’s surprising how few professional photographers go to great lengths to back up their work properly.
The most common backup option is a computer, with an additional backup on an external hard drive. While this is reasonably safe, hard drives can easily get damaged. In fact, they may become corrupted over time, even if you don’t use them often. And in case of unforeseen issues — like burglars or house fires — you could easily lose a ton of valuable work.
That’s why you should keep a copy of your portfolio photos on a secure cloud storage platform. For photography purposes, services like Dropbox or Google Drive are safe enough. Plus, they’re easy to use even if you don’t have a lot of experience with similar platforms.
Before uploading your photos, you may need to digitize them if you only have physical copies at the moment. Unfortunately, scanning the photos yourself can be a hassle, and you won’t get the highest-quality digital image without experience and a top-notch scanner.
To do it easily, find a service to digitize the photos for you. Capture can easily convert negatives to digital images for you — all you have to do is properly label and ship the negatives.
After that, you can upload the images to any cloud service and keep them safe year-round. Plus, you’ll free up some space for new photos and accompanying equipment.
How To Use Memory Cards Properly
If you’re keen on properly preserving and managing your portfolio, you need to keep this goal in mind from the start of production.
When you’re serious about safe backups, the process starts with your camera.
On most modern cameras, you’ll find two memory card slots. One is for your main card, while the other is for a secondary card you can use for storage if you fill up the main one. However, memory overflow isn’t the only purpose of the secondary card — you can also use it as a backup. Just properly label them to know which is which.
If you offload your photos regularly, you won’t need the overflow function to begin with. Just make a habit of exporting new photos after each outing or job. That way, you’ll never fill out the first card, and you can use the other one for backups.
Also, it’s important to buy high-quality memory cards for your camera. They’re relatively cheap, but you want to make sure that data won’t get corrupted even as thousands of images pass through the card on a daily basis. Many professional photographers prefer the cards made by SanDisk because of their dependability.
That being said, you don’t need to buy the most expensive card on the market. Stick with mid-range cards that don’t cause buffering issues — in most cases, this will be enough. Of course, if you work with 4K RAW videos as a videographer, you’ll need something more robust and expensive.
Managing Portfolio With External Hard Drives
External hard drives are another common memory tool for photo backups — but you need to know how to use them properly.
With the right software configuration, you can set two hard drives to sync with each other. That way, you can export your photos to one hard drive, and a copy will automatically be created on another. It’s one of the basic methods for preserving and managing your portfolio safely.
Funnily enough, the technical term for this setup is JBOD — meaning Just a Bunch Of Drives. These days, this usually means two SSD drives since they’re faster and more dependable than old HDDs.
Plus, even if data corruption happens, it’s highly improbable that it will occur on both drives simultaneously — on average, the failure rate for modern SSDs is lower than 1.5 percent.
In practice, you need file synchronization software to connect the master and backup drives and ensure they work properly. There are plenty of options out there, and the most dependable ones charge a fee. Still, it’s usually not more than $30 per year, which is more than manageable for most photographers.
However, as mentioned above, a JBOD setup won’t protect you from physical damage or theft because you’re still storing your photos in physical storage. For an additional backup, you need a cloud storage solution. So, this should be one of your many backup methods — not your only one.
Alternative to Cloud Solutions: Safe Storage at Home
If you don’t have a speedy Internet connection that would allow fast uploads, backing up on cloud storage isn’t a practical option. In this case, consider investing in a fireproof safe. With the right fire rating, these safes can withstand a home fire — and they also keep your negatives, photos, and hard drives safe from burglars.
These safes can be expensive, but yours doesn’t have to be large — the photos and hard drives don’t take up too much space.
Wrapping Up
As you can see, preserving and managing your portfolio safely takes a lot of work — at least until you set up your backup workflow and make a habit of it. However, taking the necessary precautions will ensure your portfolio is safe in the long run.
And, of course, none of these suggestions are gospel — you can always adjust them to your established routines. However, if you’re going to keep one thing in mind, remember this — it’s always essential to keep at least two copies of every photo in a digital format. That’s the essence of any backup process.