Photo Storage Strategy, Agency or Individual

By 2014-05-01Featured

What to Do with All Those Photos? Photo Storage Strategy:

I was recently tasked with researching and developing a new Photo Storage Strategy for our Texas Marketing Firm, E.H. Anderson PR. I evaluated all of the hard drive, external drive and online storage resources we currently have. We are still considering all of the options I have found, including expanding our current use of Dropbox. Once we decide on one of the below resources, we will finalize a suggested protocol to follow which will ensure the photos our team members take are properly saved, accessible to us and properly SEO modified. While my research was based around the specific needs of our agency, the tips and steps described below may prove useful to any organization or individual with a camera or cell phone. 1) When you take photos or videos at an event:

  • Utilize the photos or videos immediately for social networking if possible. Use the on-site check-in feature of Facebook to promote our activity. (As a backup if internet/signal is not available on site, you can check in afterwards from any location by telling Facebook that’s where you are.)
  • After you are finished at the shoot, go through and erase any duplicate or bad photos. Choose to keep only the best images from what you have captured.

2) Backing Up the Media

  • As soon as possible, synch the device with the computer or drive in which you back up your images. After saving them, erase photos from your phone or camera to make space for the next shoot.

3) Utilize External Drives

  • An option for making photos accessible to you on any device or computer is buying external drives. Our agency uses these to make files available to each team member.
  • Be sure to create and name folders in a logical fashion, ordered chronologically so you  will easily be able to find photos once you have copied them to these external drives.
  • Back at your work station, test the drive to ensure you are able to access the media added to the drive. Before using or uploading the photos to a website, you need to name them according to the purpose you intend for them. This will help with SEO.

4) Accessing Photos

  • If you know you may need files or photos remotely, try to bring your external drive with you if possible.
  • For now, our policy is to delete photos off of the external drive after two years to conserve space. You might consider a similar rule.

5) Quick Sharing of Media

  • While at events, or in other circumstances, it may be necessary to share media immediately between our team members in small quantities.
  • To do this, create a photo stream on your iPhone, and then tap the “People” tab. Type in both the person’s contact information as they are listed in your phone, and their email address.
  • This will allow them to access the photo stream from their mobile device, or from their laptop later.
  • Keep in mind, it is difficult to download photo streams, and this feature is best used for small quantity, individual photo sharing and download.

6) Dropbox as a Current Storage Option

  • Our team currently uses Dropbox for much of our client work. We are considering migrating all of our photo storage to Dropbox as well.
  • Dropbox, like Google and other online supported storage systems has a mobile app that makes accessing images and videos easy from anywhere.

Looking to the Future If storage space becomes an issue on your external drives or main backup system, Google resources are a possible free option for both storage space and mobile access to photo files. Google Drive / Google + This makes the most sense for photo storage expansion, because a growing number of people are already familiar with the platform. Google drive allows users 15 GB of free storage before you have to pay to buy more. With all of the spreadsheets, email and contacts I currently have loaded on my account, I’m using only 1 GB, which is seven percent of my total storage available. (See next page for chart.) Note that if we allocated only 12 GB to photo storage, we could store 3,000 medium to high res images. Also, Google has a very reasonable pricing table if you ever need more space for image storage or other business needs. So, if you need an easy way to store and share more photos and be able to access them from mobile devices, I recommend utilizing a combination of Google Drive and Google +.