The Optimal Method for Safeguarding Your Wedding Photographs

You have your wedding photographs, so what next? Most couples spend months, if not years planning every part of their wedding day down to the finest detail, including a considerable amount of time choosing a wedding photographer. They then invest a significant amount of the budget for the wedding on their chosen photographer. After the wedding when they receive their photographs, they relive all the magical moments of the day and share their photographs with their family and friends on Instagram and Facebook. But what happens next?

Are U.S.B memory sticks a reliable way of storing your wedding photographs?

No, absolutely not. When we provide a client with their wedding photographs, we make a point of explaining to them that the U.S.B memory stick is just a way of us providing you with your digital files and should never be considered as a reliable storage method for their photographs. We always advise them to back-up their files as soon as possible. It would surprise you though, just how many people ignore this or just completely forget.

The Risks of Data Corruption

The data on a U.S.B memory stick can easily become corrupted. This can happen for a variety of reasons, here are a few that have affected some of our own clients:

• Plugged the U.S.B memory stick into a games console so they could view images on their television. Some how the games console formatted the drive and wiped everything.
• Plugged the U.S.B memory stick into a photo kiosk printing machine. The photos printed fine but the next time they tried to access the drive all of the files where corrupted and they could not open them.
• Plugged the U.S.B memory stick directly into their television. Everything seemed fine until the next time they tried to use the drive and found that the files had become corrupted and couldn’t be opened.
• Plugged the U.S.B drive unknowingly into a computer that had a virus. When they plugged the drive back into their own computer not only was the U.S.B memory stick corrupted but it also infected their own laptop.
• Plugged the U.S.B drive into a portable media player. The media players software crashed during use and when they attempted to remove and reinsert the drive it no longer had any data on it.

With such a small portable device like a U.S.B memory stick there is also always the chance it could be easily lost or damaged.

The Best Way to Store Your Wedding Photographs

Multiple back-ups of your wedding photographs are the best option. Never rely on just a single way of storing your images. Firstly, technology changes at a fast pace. In 10 years, from now this will likely be a completely dead technology. The very same thing will happen at some point to U.S.B memory sticks, external hard drives etc. We want you and your family to be able to enjoy your wedding photographs for years to come, so it’s important to store your images on multiple devices and when technology takes its next jump be prepared to move your photographs to new formats.

Recommended Storage Solutions

External Hard Drives

We use a lot of external hard drives for local storage. From all of the brands we have used we have found Western Digital to be the most reliable. All hard drives can fail though, so it’s always worthwhile having multiple drives.

Google Drive

Do you have a google email account? Google provide 15gb of free online storage for personal use via Google drive if you do. It’s very easy to use and 15gb is more than enough space to store all of your wedding photographs in full resolution.

Reliable Hardware and Capacities

As a wedding photographer, you may know how crucial it is to have high-quality flash drives. This is why you need to have a reliable distributor for your USB keys and memory storage. USB Memory Direct allows you to select your required capacity of the drive.

Available USB Capacity Options:

• USB 2.0: 256 MB, 2 GB, and 64GB.
• USB 3.0: 8GB, 64GB, and 128GB.

Note: USB 3.0 options may even be large enough for you to deliver raw files upon request, depending on the size you shoot.