Having a backup and organizing your photos is one of the most important things we can do as photographers. Though we know sometimes you may have no clue where to start, or what the best way to do things is, which is why we’ve made a guide on how to backup your photos properly and what our favorite products are to do so.

Our Backup Process

When traveling, we use our SanDisk 2TB SSD’s to ensure nothing is lost in all the moving we do while traveling. When we’re at home, we use LaCie 2TB Rugged External drives, since even though these are the most secure, we still don’t like risking bringing a disk drive with us while traveling.

Right when we get home (or to our hotel) from a shoot, we start the backup process.

1. First we create a new folder (check below for our file organization process) – and drop all of our photos into our “raw” folder.
2. We then create an exact copy of that folder onto our backup drive (usually the same exact drive as what we use for our main drive).
3. After the photos are done uploading, we use BackBlaze to backup our external drive to the cloud.

Our Organization Process

We use each LaCie or SanDisk for 3 months, organizing each one out by months so we know exactly what is one each drive.

How each external hard drive is organized (example names used):

1. PHOTOS
2. October (or whatever month it is)
3. 15.Oct.2021 | Devyn + Brad
4. Raw (where we put all the raw photos)
5. LRC (we create a new LRC for each session)
6. PREVIEW (where we save the preview gallery)
7. FINAL (where we save the final gallery)
8. GETTING READY (in the FINAL folder) (then when we export weddings + elopements we organize by section of the day)

Our Upload Process

If you’ve ever shot a wedding, you know you can easily have 2000k + photos to go through after the day, which is why we use Narrative Select to cull through our photos. This is our process that we go through after uploading the photos into the “raw” folder

1. Plug in External hard drive + make folder with the names of the couple
2. Make RAW folder
3. Pull all RAW photos into “raw” folder
4. Once they are all uploaded I open Narrative Select + choose what folder I want to be pulling from
5. Cull
6. Either click “send to Lightroom” or if that doesn’t work, select all your selected photos (command A selects all), click “file” up top and click “move file” and move them to a new folder called “PICK”
7. I then upload into Lightroom
8. Separate out by scene /section of the day
9. Edit
10. Export by scene /section of the day
11. Run through JPEG Mini
12. Upload into PicTime

Our Favorite Products

For starters, we buy all of our products from either B+H or Best Buy, while Amazon may have better prices sometimes, we’ve heard of too many fake memory cards and corrupt external hard drives coming from them to risk it.

LaCie 2TB Rugged External Hard Drive

SanDisk 2tb Extreme Portable SSD

SanDisk 64gb Extreme Pro SDX

Apple USB SD Card Reader

Sony 64GB G Series XQD

Sony XQD Reader

BackBlaze

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