A simple method for organizing and backing up photos while on the road

If you’re a traveling photographer, having a well-organized and efficient backup workflow can seem a bit challenging. In his recent video, Mark Denney shares his approach to capturing, organizing, and backing up his precious landscape photos, both while on the road and when he gets back home. So, if you’re still figuring out the best backup method, this video comes just in time!

Like all of us, Mark shoots tons of photos first. He emphasizes the importance of shooting in RAW format to preserve as much data as possible for greater flexibility during the editing process.

Mark uses a portable hard drive to back up his photos while he is on a shoot. He copies all the images from his SD card to the hard drive at the end of each shooting day.

Once he returns home from a trip, Mark transfers all the photos from the hard drive to his desktop computer. He creates a folder for each trip and organizes the photos within the folders by day. You can choose your method of organization of course. Personally, I tend to organize folders by specific trips, and then create sub-folders with each day or each hike (if it was a hiking trip).

In addition to the local backups, Mark also uses a cloud-based backup service. He uploads all of his photos to the cloud to ensure they are safe in case of a hardware failure or other disaster. Finally, every year, Mark creates a physical backup of all his photos on a separate hard drive. He stores this drive in a safe place as an additional safeguard.

I have to admit that I myself don’t have the most efficient method of backing up photos. I still have some CDs with photos from the late 2000s that I haven’t transferred to a hard drive. Not to mention my completely random Google Drive and the photo folders on it. But I’m working on it, and slowly getting there, hoping to have my digital photos safe and sound for years to come. This is why I find videos like this useful, and I hope you will as well. And for some more ideas, take a look at the articles below, too.

• How to back up your photos and video on location the easy way with a smartphone and an SSD
• Amazon, Google, SmugMug, Apple: what’s the best home for your photos?
• How to get your photos and videos backed up so you don’t lose them forever
• 5 alternatives to Google Photos cloud storage for backing up your work
• How I store and backup my photography
• How To Backup Computer Files – Photographers Primer
• If you don’t want to risk losing your data you need a good backup workflow

[How to Quickly Organize & Cull 1000’s of Landscape Photos via FStoppers]

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