One of the strangest things I ever saw in a photography group thread was a newborn photographer who delivered her clients images, and only gave them 14 days to download them. After that, she deleted the gallery. Her clients reached out to her after noticing the link wasn’t working anymore and informed her that they never had the opportunity to download the images due to the craziness of having a newborn. They asked her to resend the gallery and she was coming to the group for advice on how to tell them that she no longer had the photos – edited or unedited.

She never verified that her clients downloaded the images before deleting them from the gallery and permanently off her hard drive. She had also already formatted the cards and use them again since then. All of those once in a lifetime newborn photos – gone. The clients had paid several hundred dollars and didn’t have a single photo to show for it.

While I believe that communicating your post-process with clients is important and they agreed to it contractually, I never understood the concept of deleting photos immediately after delivery. Moving, house fires, natural disasters, ect. All things that can take away those prints, USB’s and external hard drives.

I personally like to keep a copy of my clients delivered JPEGs for as long as possible. I’ll be totally honest and say that my first few years in business, I wasn’t perfect at doing this but in recent years I’ve been adamant about protecting my clients’ photos. I don’t have every clients’ images backed up, but I do have the very vast majority. The very first wedding I ever photographed was in 2018. I was living in Hampton Roads, Virginia. The couple reached out to me a few months ago (2024) to see if I might still have a copy of their photos as they lost them due to a very unfortunate circumstance. After combing through my external hard drives, I found them!

I know that saving clients’ images forever isn’t feasible in reality, I WILL do my best. If you’re a past client of mine and you’re ever missing your photos, please don’t hesitate to reach out!

If you’re a photographer looking for storage solutions, I recommend these two external hard drives for tangible back-up and Dropbox for online storage:

WD 4TB Elements Portable External Hard Drive
Western Digital 14TB Elements Desktop External Hard Drive
Dropbox