With 2018 winding down to a close, it’s time to start thinking about what to do with all of those wondrous images we’ve created. Storing them on a hard drive is difficult, because if the hard drive gets lost — so do your photos. The New Year is a perfect time to re-organize your life, do some cleaning, and keep your photos safe!

Whether you use Capture One, Lightroom, Photoshop, Luminar, or even Snapseed, having a good backup solution is imperative to keeping your photos safe. Having an organized backup solution is even better. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve opened up an email saying that a client lost the photos and needs them re-sent. For this you will need Google Drive or Dropbox — I personally use Google Drive, and a little bit of setup. 

First, in your settings, turn on sync for a folder called, say, “Finished Photos” inside of that, follow your current organization scene. If you don’t have one, this is what I do. I make a folder for the year, so for this, it will be 2018, and then inside of that folder I have subfolders for every export I do. Within Capture One I am sure to set up an export template of [Image Year]_[Image Month]_[Image Day]_[Shoot Title] – the reason I use Year_Month_Day is that when I am organizing the folder by name – it automatically orders it by date as well! Easy peasy. The shoot title is a simple, unique, one or two-word title of the shoot so I can easily find it. So if I have a shoot on January First it might be 2019_01_01_LeeMorrisHeadshot. 

By placing your folders inside of a Google Drive/Dropbox sync folder every JPEG you export will instantly be synced to the service, ensuring that you automatically have two backups. One on your computer, and one on the cloud. Cloud storage is dirt-cheap to free so this is a fantastic way to keep a backup fo your images ready at all times