You’ve been dreaming of your big day for months, years or even a lifetime. You’ve poured over the details, selected your dream team of vendors, all to bring your big day to life and before you know it, you got married!! WOO! Now that you received your online gallery of images and spend all day (cough, all week, cough) looking through them over and over, what’s next? Those precious memories will stay treasured forever if you know how to save and preserve them. Let’s look at some of the best ways to back up your wedding photo gallery.
1. External Hard Drive
One of the first steps to take is backing up your images to an external hard drive. The more places your images are stored, the more likely they are to be recovered should Facebook go away or your computer crashes. Backing up to an external hard drive is as easy as can be! Whether you have a physical USB or a link to download, you can save the images to your local drive and then copy them to an external hard drive. External drives can be easily purchased online and if you’re an overachiever like me, backing up to two hard drives is highly recommended. Should one be misplaced or fail, you’ll have a back up. Pro tip: Leave one with a loved one for even more protection.
2. The Cloud
We’re all accustomed to saving documents, photos, music, etc on the Cloud, so it’s natural to also back up your wedding images there too! I love this in tandem with hard drive backups giving you extra peace of mind should your physical drive be lost, stolen, or damaged – you have a virtual way to access the files as well. Bonus: you can access the images from anywhere!
Some of my favorite cloud storage websites:
Dropbox
Google Drive
Apple’s iCloud
3. Print your pictures
Of course one of the best ways to preserve your images is to print them! I’m bias, but these family heirlooms stand the test of time! Albums and prints are a physical reminder of your most special day, and let’s face it – as technology changes, and/or fails, your professionally printed, designed and curated album will never let you down! Plus – no subscription required! Albums only get better with age!
4. Mix it up
It may sound obvious, but don’t simply rely on just one method. You want to make sure you have access to your images forever and ever, not just while you have access to your cloud log-in or social media. The same goes for prints! If the unthinkable happens and you no longer have your album or prints, you’d want to make sure you had an electronic backup in order to print them again. Relying on just one method means there’s a chance that method could fail, and you’ll want to prepare for anything that life brings your way.
If you loved this post about How To Back Up Your Wedding Photo Gallery and you’re inspired to print your wedding photos, check out my post HERE all about why you should invest in an album.
