Today’s professional photographer has a myriad of digital tools at their disposal to create content more easily and with better results than ever before. Gone are the days of the required darkroom, chemicals, and expensive, specially-treated paper photographers used to produce photos, the digital revolution changed all that. Now, results are instant–thanks to digital cameras and digital storage–photographers don’t have to wait to develop photos in order to view them.
Whether you’re an experienced professional, or recently new to photography, this article will cover the tools to make your job easier and achieve the best results. We’ll assume you’ve already chosen the best digital camera(s) for your needs and will instead focus on digital storage, how to manage your library of work, edit and optimize images, and how to archive and share with others. Let’s explore and answer some common questions many photographers have such as:
The removable flash storage in your camera starts to fill up as you take photos. The number of photos you can store depends on the photo resolution you set. HD (or, High Resolution) photos will fill up a card faster than SD (Standard Definition) photos, because their file size is much larger.
Many professional photographers prefer to shoot in RAW format, at a very high resolution. This method can fill up flash storage quickly. At some point your flash card will reach maximum capacity and require offloading or erasure of files to make room for new photos.
Most photographers will want to review their work on a laptop, tablet, or smartphone and decide which photos to keep, and which to delete. Once you have all the photos you want to keep, you will want to store them on digital media that will preserve them reliably, while enabling you to edit and share them with colleagues. There are several ways to do this:
Keep the photos you want on the SD card creating an archive (kind of like keeping the ‘negatives’), and then insert a new, blank SD card into your camera to start shooting again.
Choose a portable drive or USB flash drive that will give you the flexibility to transport your work between devices - like from a laptop to your studio or home workstation.
External desktop drives have comparable storage to a portable drive, but reside at home or office and have extended capacity.
Use internal drives for faster editing than with external drives. Choose a laptop or PC with a fast internal drive or upgrade your current device with a fast internal drive.
Multiple-Drive RAID devices that are transportable for remote jobs, and fast when you’re dealing with massive amounts of data like super high-resolution photos or RAW format photos.
Cloud storage lets you upload to a remote server and allows you to access your files from wherever internet is available.
Use a Wi-Fi enabled drive that will offload photos from your Wi-Fi equipped camera directly to the drive as you shoot.
Today’s professional photographers can choose from a variety of storage form factors, capacities and speeds. Let’s take a look at some of the most popular:
Online solutions are great options in terms of capacity and flexibility. Here are some elements to consider: