Storing digital wedding photos forever is as essential a planning step as the wedding itself.

After all, you spent months planning everything down to the most minute details—dreaming about sharing your big day with the people you love the most—and then gliding through your wedding day on a cloud of adrenaline and bliss. But now it’s over in a blink and all that’s left are your memories and some killer images (and possibly video) of the entire experience.

When you finally get the finished images in your hot little hands, you sit down and find yourself engrossed in all the emotions they evoke as you flip through them—smiles, tears, belly laughs, tender moments and dance-floor shenanigans! There’s that moment you shared with your mom before the ceremony and both cried. Good thing you got that out before you walked down the aisle!

Oi! That moment your wife made you laugh so hard during the vows! You thought you loved her before, but that moment nearly made your heart burst from your chest!

Oh look! There’s Cousin Helen busting a move on the dance floor after one too many glasses of the bubbly. Who knew she could Macarena like such a boss?

The point is that after the memories of the day fade, all that’s left to refresh them and bring them back to life are the images and video, so it’s SO important to make a plan for storing your digital wedding photos.

And yet, we get too many calls from couples who have lost their only copy of their digitals—through computer crashes or online hacks or faulty memory sticks—desperately hoping we will have a copy of their photos archived somewhere. And, even though we often keep photos for a short time for promotional purposes, most photographers only keep the photos that they love the most and get rid of the rest. Imagine if we offered to store your digital wedding photos forever…we’d have an entire room in our house full of external harddrives! Usually, once your photographer hands over your digitals, they are no longer responsible for them. So, it’s really important to make a plan to backup your photos and videos in more than one place. That way, barring a nuclear disaster, you’ll always have a copy to return to if you lose one to any of the issues we mentioned above.

Our recommendations for backing up your digital files:

1. Save a copy to your current computer. This will the copy you go to when you want to get some printed or post one on social media or send a few to Cousin Helen (💃🏻🍾😉)!
    
2. Add a copy to an external harddrive (one that does not stay plugged into your computer, but is strictly used to hold copies of your most precious digital memories). This is the backup copy you can easily grab if your computer crashes and you need to reload images onto it after you get it fixed or if you get a new one). Here are some suggestions for reliable external harddrives.Best External Harddrives of 2019
   
   
3. Save them all to a USB (or three). This copy you can bring with you when you visit friends and family after your wedding. Use this copy to show them the photos on your laptop if they want to see them or give them a copy if you’re feeling generous.
   
   
4. Save them into an online folder. iCloud and Google Drive are both great options to store digital files and, since they are such huge companies, the chances that their servers will be corrupted and crash, losing all your digital assets, is quite slim. If it ever does happen, it’s okay because you’ll still have your backup copies stored on other devices. 

This may seem like a bit of overkill, but it’s always better to be safe than sorry, right! It’s easier to create a few backups than to try to re-create some of the photos of the big day (which we’ve also had couples request). 

Bottom line: Those memories are a big deal, take good care of them!