How to Safely Back Up Your Photo Files

Hey, what's up, guys? Professional outdoor photographer David Johnston here for Outdoor Photography Guide. What I want to talk about today is something that's really important for a lot of us, and that's photo storage. Where do you safely store your images and your files so that you don't lose them, and you don't lose those memories of the trips, of the outdoor places that you go visit? The first thing I want to tackle is actually the infield work of backing up your images, and it may seem obvious, but that's using SD cards. And we all have SD cards, or memory cards, or micro SD cards, whatever you're using for your camera, in our camera already. So it may be obvious that you do this. However, when I go on trips, what I like to do is store a lot of different memory cards and keep them all in this safe case, so that if they do get in water, if they do get in mud or anything like that, they're kept safely. Now, I like to diversify my images over several different cards, because if I lose one card, say, I have like a 128-gig, 256-gig memory card that I'm using to take a lot of images on, if I lose that one card, I lose all the images from that trip. If I separate those out over several eight-gig or 16-gig or any 32 or anything like that, I have several different options that I can lose, and I don't lose the entirety of the trip when I'm talking about my image files. So I like to take several different cards with me and fill up this book so that I can take a lot of photos and not worry if I'd lose one card, I don't lose everything from the entire trip. Now, let's take it over into the computer. I know cloud storage has become very popular, and I actually love using cloud storage to store a lot of my image files once I finish exporting them from post-processing. So I like to use cloud storage to do things like search a lot of my images, the finished images by date taken or date uploaded. You can switch back-and-forth between those. And it just makes it really easy to scroll through those options and say, "You know, I think I was there in April of 2018," and you can click on that and it'll bring up all the images from that month and year. You can also sort through different things, like your subject matter. Now, Artificial Intelligence comes into play here, and a lot of the cloud storage files will actually store your images in sub-categorized folders based on the subject matter that's in there, using their Artificial Intelligence. Now, this isn't always the most accurate way, but I've found doing things like looking up waterfalls, and a lot of those photos from my cloud storage works really well with their sub-categorized keywords that they use using their Artificial Intelligence. You can actually go in here and type in your own keywords manually if you would rather do that, but I like for it to just do it for me automatically and fix what it gets wrong. So I can click things like waterfalls, I can click things like animals in my images, and scroll through and see all the images of wildlife that I've taken in the field as well and uploaded into the cloud. Now, the last way is to store a mass quantity of image files. And I do this when I come back from a trip. I do this on a trip, and I do this with time-lapse photography a lot, because a lot of image files, especially taken with a full-frame camera, can really bog down your computer, slow it down and take up a lot of memory space. So what I like to use are these little external hard drives that are extremely small but also extremely powerful. This is a one terabyte, and I got it actually a few years ago, and I've yet to fill it up, and I've taken thousands of images, and thousands of time-lapse images to basically fill this thing up, and I still hasn't been filled. So what I like to do is just, if I am on a trip, I'll bring it with me, really easy to just throw in my carry-on luggage, so it doesn't get lost if they lose my luggage. And I'll just import all of the photos that I take while I am out on the trip, put them directly on my external hard drive, and then, I know that if I lose an SD card, I'm still not losing those. So I'll come back every night and back up all my images on one of these external hard drives. And again, I can categorize my folders in the external hard drive, and search those on my computer later, so that I know I can easily find my amazing memories whenever I am out in the field and want to look back on those of my adventures in outdoor photography.