I wanted to start a new section to the blog – a place where anyone can ask me things anything photography related.

This question comes from Allison via Facebook: “What is the best way to archive digital photos?”

This is such an incredibly important question because archiving images is paramount. With today’s digital world and thousands of images that we collect, we want to make sure that the images are archived so that we have them for future generations. Today I’m going to address digital archiving, since we obviously don’t print every single photo we take (or maybe it’s just me that doesn’t!).

My #1 recommendation is to archive images in two different places. This is important in case one thing fails – I have had an external drive completely fail on me and believe me, I was so happy I had the images in another place. Aside from archiving every single photo session I do, I also archive all of my personal family photos this way.

– #1 archive to an external hard drive

– #2 archive to cloud storage – every personal & client file goes to my cloud storage via Livedrive.com

– #3 client files are actually archived to a third place – SmugMug.com which serves as an online gallery. SmugMug is also a great place to share photos and offers several options for joining.

It can get a little overwhelming to archive this way, but it’s also important to stay organized. Personal photos are archived by month (DSLR and iphone photos are all put into the same folder) and client photos are organized by last name and date of the session.

I hope this information is helpful in backing up your precious images! To submit your own Ask The Photographer question, please email me! mariah@mariahmilan.com or visit me on Facebook.