HOW TO BACK UP YOUR PHOTOS

Today I want to talk about something that’s important.  Something we should all be doing: how to back up your photos.

After loosing all of my  photos right after Pookah was born when I lost my phone, I have become ANAL about keeping my photos safe.  It is so easy these days to let your photos live on your hard drive or on your phone or on Facebook.

Today, I’m going to share my workflow that I use to back up my photos   Hopefully,it will help you keep your memories safe.

My Phone Workflow:

With the photos on my phone, I have numerous ways that I make sure I always have several copies of my photos, or at least my favorites.

• Instagram: This is the easy FUN way to back up the photos on your phone. And you can share from here anywhere. Including Facebook,  Tumbler, and Flickr.
• Google+.  This is a new one for me.  I discovered this on Baby Making Machine’s blog.  Do you know that if you have the google+ app on your phone, you can set it to AUTOMATICALLY upload your photos for you?  You can set it that it does it as soon as you take a photo or only when you are connected to wi-fi.  My photos are continuously backed up.  Without me doing a thing.  EVERY SINGLE PHOTO.  Even the ones I don’t want to keep.  Even the blurry ones.  ALL OF THEM. It’s Free and you get 15GB of storage.  And the REAL beauty of this is that I can delete photos off of my phone. Because they are backed up for me!
• IFTTT:  This is an ingenious little website that lets you set parameters not just on photos but everything.  The premise is: IF THIS THEN THAT.  I originally started using this to organize some things social media, but realized quickly that I could use this for my photography workflow.  You can make lots of recipes but the one I use is: If instagram then Flickr.  So whenever I post a photo to Instagram, IFTTT automatically sends that photo to Flickr.
• The Cloud.  And yes, all of my iphone photos are backed up on the Cloud through Apple. Yes, I had to buy extra data for this.  But it’s worth it.
• PRINT THE PHOTOS! There are lots of ways/companies that you can print out good quality photos from your phone/instagram: Persnicktey Prints, instacanvas, Stickygram are just a few of my favorites.  Check them out!

So there.  I have FIVE  places my phone photos go.  I used to use Dropbox, but ran out of room.  It was just easier to add extra space on the cloud.

My DSLR Workflow:

Whenever I take photos, as soon as I get home, the first thing I do is to upload my photos to Lightroom.  That way, the photos are somewhere other than just my CF card.

The beauty of Lightroom is that I just store the digital negatives on it.  Not the actual edited photo.  So as long as my lightroom catalog is in tact, so are my negatives.

But what if your hard drive crashes? Or your external hard drive where your catalog lives dies???

Enter Crashplan.  My entire hard drive AND external hardrive are backed up to Crashplan.  So if anything happens, I will at least get the last download back.  I don’t have to think about it.  It just runs in the background ALL THE TIME. Or you can set it to only upload in the middle of the night.

After my photos are uploaded, culled and edited, I export them to three places:

• My external Hard Drive: No photo lives on the hard drive on my laptop.  NONE.  First off, I would use up all of the memory.  But second, if my hard drive crashes, I’m screwed.  So my photos all live on my external hard drive.  Even my Lightroom catalog.  So those digital negatives: external hard drive.  Edited photos: external hard drive.
• Flickr is useful because all of my photos for my blog live there.  Every photo shoot I take lives there.  Photos that I never share, live there. If I have taken the time to edit the photo, it lives on Flickr.  And Flickr is FREE.  You don’t have to have the pro account( even though I have one…for the storage space).  And I upload these photos to Flickr DIRECTLY from lightroom.  There is a plug in.
• SmugMug.  I started using SmugMug when I got a free trial back in January from Clickin Moms.  This is where I export my photos for printing.  And this is also where I send full resolution photos for clients that I take photos for.  It’s not free, but the plan for the non pro is cheap.  And worth it. And once again, I upload directly from Lightroom.

Have I mentioned how much I love Lightroom?????

It is only NOW, after I have done these three things( upload to Lightroom, export to Flickr AND Smugmug) that I reformat my CF card and erase the photos.

My last step is to PRINT my photos.  I hoard all of these photos and when I catch a sale on various sites, I PRINT.  About once every 3 months.  That’s a lot of photos so I need a good sale.   But it’s usually really easy to find one.

SO that is how I safeguard my memories. It takes time to set it up, but once you do, the rest is easy.  Because it becomes automatic.  The key I think, is to automate EVERYTHING so that you don’t have to think about it.  That way, it’s done. If one part of the system fails, your photos are somewhere else.

How about you guys? How do you safeguard your memories? How do you back up your photos?

**I’ve linked to various sites in this post just because I love them.  Not because I got paid to represent ANY of them.  They are just great. LOL**