How long do professional photographers keep photos? Well, one of the less glamorous sides of running a photography business is looking after the back-office administration. It’s important to keep track of hundreds of thousands of photos – labelling, filing, backing up, and working out comprehensive storage systems. It is crucial for a professional photographer to have these systems in place.
Yawn.
OK I get it, some of you wanted a quick answer. So here’s mine: 6 months.
The longer answer is that although I state that I will keep your images for 6 months, I only actually delete images when I need to free up storage space, so in reality, I hold on to them for much longer.
I back up all of my finished images to an external hard drive and two locations in the cloud – my online gallery and pCloud. This means that when you work with me your event photography and personal branding photos are safe, even if you’re the sort of person that manages to lose files regularly.
Cloud and physical storage space is costly, which is why photographers don’t hold on to files indefinitely. When I deliver your files via a beautiful online gallery, this gallery is time-limited because online storage is charged per gigabyte.
So, how long do professional photographers keep photos?
The answer to the question “How long do professional photographers keep photos?” will vary from photographer to photographer – but it’s a very important question to ask when choosing your vendor.
