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PseulgeWeetly
Joined: 08 Apr 2008
Posts: 1
Location: USA
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 Posted: Thu Apr 17, 2008 12:17 pm Post subject: Question for professional photographers? |
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| My wife wants to keep 2 copies of every wedding she has ever done. This adds up to a lot of discs. What is your business policy for keeping a client's photos? 1 year? 6 months? Forever? I think we should give them a disc and wash our hands of the photos. Otherwise we are looking at hundreds of thousands of photos.... eeek. Any thoughts? |
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TelulahB
Joined: 22 Nov 2007
Posts: 6
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| Posted: Thu Apr 17, 2008 3:01 pm Post subject: Question for professional photographers? |
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| i worked for a company who keep a copy of the clients images forever but im not sure if this is standard practice. it happened that one clients house was destroyed in a flood and the company were able to give them back some of their photos which was great! if your worried about stacks of discs you could always invest in an external hard drive... there not too expensive really! |
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redcurleyz4059
Joined: 17 Feb 2008
Posts: 2
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| Posted: Thu Apr 17, 2008 5:44 pm Post subject: Question for professional photographers? |
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| She is right. I save 2 copies- one on a local file server and the other on a an external drive, which comes home with me daily (holds about 20,000 10Meg jpg compressed photos). That way, even if my business burns down, I have a copy. Storage space is so cheap- all you need is one client to request copies and you will make enough to pay for the storage. I am too lazy to burn CDs. I just buy more hard drive space. The bigger problem is indexing the photos so you can quickly find the ones you are looking for. Having the pictures on hard drives makes this easier. |
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nokAbammafoda
Joined: 08 Jan 2008
Posts: 16
Location: Liberia
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| Posted: Thu Apr 17, 2008 8:28 pm Post subject: Question for professional photographers? |
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| Agree with Claire, you need to get the photos on an external hard drive. You can get them with HUGE capacities and internal back up to back up systems. It is actually a much safer and reliable long term storage medium than CDs. There are many ways of looking at this problem. If you do give the clients a CD, you are releasing your hard work to be output by anybody with a home printer or Wally World access and this reflects bad on YOU. I have given, or rather SOLD, the photos on CD to clients, and they still come to me for quality canvas prints and such because they soon realize there is much more to producing good photos than just having files on a disc. So, I STILL have to keep copies of the photos. You are offering a professional service and I personally feel it is your responsibility to keep the photos stored safely indefinitely. You expect doctors, lawyers, accountants or any other professional to maintain records.. why should you be any different?The Yellow Machine is an outside storage unit in which you might be interested:http://www.amazon.com/YELLOW-MACHINE-P400T-Network-Hard-Drive/dp/B000CQVHKO/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/102-3493157-5530521?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1208789016&sr=8-1steve |
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Sparky
Joined: 20 Jan 2008
Posts: 10
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| Posted: Thu Apr 17, 2008 11:12 pm Post subject: Question for professional photographers? |
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| Depends on the policy of the company(assuming a sole proprietorship). Add the duration of image retention to your contract. This will give the clients up front knowledge of how long they can order/reorder/get more prints.I know me, and I keep all my images forever. They are the photographers images, and you may never know when she might be able to make additional money on the images, as stock, add or just needed for a portfolio of images. I'd recommend 2 years, then archive off to disc/offsite storage.I keep all images on an external hard drive, plus I make DVD backups and store off site(bank safe deposit box or similar). I organize with ACDSee, so I can get to whatever I need quickly and easily.So, in short, always keep all the images. Not necessarily accessible immediately after say 2 years, but definitely keep them somehow. |
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tea_drinker
Joined: 10 Mar 2008
Posts: 2
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| Posted: Fri Apr 18, 2008 1:55 am Post subject: Question for professional photographers? |
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| You are obviously not a photographer or know what the business processes for a photographer are.1) Your wife owns the copyright to all the images and the backup CD's of all her work is a portion of her income.2) In the past when photographers used film, they kept a library of all the negatives they shot for their clients ... it is part of the agreement signed by the client when having images photographed.3) In the current business models, the procedure is to burn two CD's and place one in a fireproof safe in the photographers work area and the second one in a secure off-site location (protects against loss due to fires, floods, etc)Business practices vary from career to career. Many records are kept for five years, others seven and in the case of medical, environmental, financial and yes photo negatives, transparencies and digital images are kept for the life of the corporation, LLC, PC or photographer.In my business, I keep all the current images on an extremal hard drive (500GB), a copy of the edited (sorted) images that I gave to the client for my reference (these images are all 600x400 pixels at 72DPI so the client is not tempted to seal the images without paying a usage fee) and two CD's (or in some cases DVD's) of the whole, unedited shoot. I shoot all assignments in RAW + JPEG Basic. I never know when the client will want to use one of the shots in a magazine or in advertising, so having a RAW image file of everything is very important.As you can see there are a lot of images to keep track of, so modifying the EXIF data on each shoot with the copyright notice, photographers contact data, clients contact data and key words is very important when building a data base and retrieval system. |
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punk_rawk_grrl
Joined: 02 Dec 2007
Posts: 6
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| Posted: Fri Apr 18, 2008 4:39 am Post subject: Question for professional photographers? |
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| You [your wife] should, by practice, hold DNG or RAW file back-ups of all of your work, especially if you are going to reserve printing rights for yourself, and not sell them. That way, any clients wishing to have additional prints made can do so at any time. The easiest way to do this would be to purchase an external HD, as opposed to burning them to disk, which can be costly and time consuming. There are 1TB (minimum) models available for a modest investment starting from around $250 to $500 with varying levels of space and use. With 1TB (1000GB), you will find it hard to fill it, and some can be expandable. That would be my suggestion. |
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