One of the most important things in photography these days is backing up and storing your photos properly. Of course photograph storage—for both prints as well as negatives and slides has always been important since the birth of photography.

It’s important to keep your prints safe and stored properly. If you do have prints from past years just lying around you should store them either in special acid free storage boxes or in albums that have proper pages. Cheap plastic pages leave chemicals and can damage your prints as well as make your prints stick to the plastic. Many stores sell plastic album pages but make sure they aren’t imaging to your photos. A place such as Archival Methods will have acrd free storage boxes and albums sleeves.

It’s important to have proper storage because you don’t want your images damaged. Proper archival framing is key as well for passing photos of your loved ones down to future generations. At Tara Patty Photography we only sell archival prints and products.

Digital Backup: 3-2-1

Now for digital images it’s a whole other ballgame. So many people these days are taking hundreds if not thousands of photos every year and yet keeping none of them. Why? Well they either forget to remove them from the camera’s memory cards (and accidentally delete that way) or do load them to a computer then forget about them—computer crashes and they’ve lost all their photographs. Digital archiving is a must—especially in this day and age of rampant computer viruses, malware and even ransomware. That’s why backing up even elsewhere from your computer is so important and today with inexpensive cloud backups there should be no reason why you wouldn’t backup always.

I subscribe to the 3-2-1 strategy— 3 copies of your data on two devices (mediums) and one offsite. Why offsite? Well think fire or other tragedy that might take your house (and your computer). We’ve certainly experienced that recently here in Colorado and many had to literally flee for their lives and couldn’t begin to unhook and take all their hard drives with them. 

So keep your images safe guarded—in print form and/or the digital images. You’ll be really glad you did.