How to not lose your photos.

Download it the day it lands.

Your gallery arrives within the week: private, password-protected, ready to download and share. The first job is to move those pictures off the internet and onto something that belongs to you, and the right moment is the day the link arrives.

Download the full-size set rather than a preview, and do it on a computer if you have one. A download onto a phone often lands somewhere temporary and quietly ends up smaller than what you were sent.

How long any given gallery stays available varies between photographers, and there is no default worth assuming, so ask rather than guess. Either way, downloading takes a few minutes now and is impossible later, so do it immediately regardless of anyone's arrangement.

While you are there, write the gallery address and the password down wherever you keep such things, with a note of who took the photographs. Both feel unforgettable in the week they happen and neither is.

Keep one copy you never touch.

Once the files are down, make a folder and treat it as read-only for life. The delivered images go in exactly as they came, at the size they came at. That folder is your master, and everything else you do is done to a duplicate.

There is a technical reason for the discipline. A JPEG is compressed every time it is written, so opening one, changing something and saving it again throws away a little more each round. Do that a handful of times and the damage shows in exactly the places that matter in a portrait: the smooth gradients across a cheek, the edge of hair against a background.

Crops are the same story. A crop is permanent if it is applied to the only copy you have, and the square you cut for a profile picture is not what you will want when someone asks for a large print. Crop copies, resize copies, send copies, leave the master alone.

If a photographer gives you a larger or different master format alongside the finished images, keep it in that format rather than converting it to something convenient. What you should expect to receive is a separate question, answered in my note on digital files. Whether the original camera captures ever reach you varies enormously and there is no standard; what those originals are, and why they usually stay with the person who made them, is in my guide comparing RAW and JPEG.

Three copies, two kinds of place.

The archival convention is short and it has survived every change in technology since people started worrying about this: three copies, on two different kinds of storage, with one of them physically somewhere else.

• The working copy, on the computer or device you actually use.
• A second copy on an external drive that lives in the house.
• A third somewhere off the property: a cloud account, or a drive kept at a relative's place or at work.

Each part fixes a specific failure. Three copies exist because one copy is not a copy, it is the only one. Two kinds of storage exist because identical devices fail in identical ways, and two drives bought together often go within a short space of each other. The third sits elsewhere because fire, flood, theft and a burst pipe take the whole building, including the tidy backup drive next to the computer it was backing up.

Two practical notes on drives. Keep them somewhere temperate, since a hot garage or an attic shortens their lives considerably. And plug them in occasionally: spinning drives seize if they sit untouched for a very long time, and solid state drives are not built to hold data indefinitely without power.

Sync is not a backup.

This is the single most expensive misunderstanding in the whole subject, and almost everyone holds it.

A sync service mirrors. Its job is to make every device show the same thing, so a photograph deleted on one of them disappears everywhere within minutes, correctly. That is the intended behavior, and it is the precise opposite of a backup, which keeps history and can hand you back the version from before the mistake.

So a photo library that syncs across your devices is not protection. It is one bad tap, one shared login, one account closure away from empty, and “it is in the cloud” is not an answer. If a cloud service is one of your three copies, good. If it is all three, you have one copy in a building you do not own.

Two related traps. Phone libraries that offer to save space by keeping smaller versions on the device and the originals on a server do exactly that, so what is in your hand may be a low resolution stand-in. And a library tied to a shared account, or to an email address you might stop using, is an access problem waiting to happen. Storage rarely fails. Access fails constantly.

Name it so a stranger could find it.

Folders should sort themselves and explain themselves without anybody having to open them.

The format that does both is date first, subject second, in the order year, month, subject: a folder called 2026-09 studio portraits sits in the right place forever, next to 2026-11 and 2025-04, without any manual sorting. Use the leading zero on single digit months or the sorting falls apart the moment October arrives.

Some rules that sound petty and are not:

• Never use final, final2 or anything containing the word real. They stop carrying meaning within a week and cause the exact confusion they were invented to prevent.
• Do not rename the delivered images inside the master folder. Rename duplicates, so a name can always be traced back.
• Drop a short plain text note in the folder saying who made the photographs, when, and what sizes are included.
• Keep the embedded information in the file. Some export tools strip the date and the credit, and once that is gone the picture has no record of where it came from.

One exception, and an important one. Copies that go on the internet should be named for the person reading them rather than for your folder structure, because a file name on a public page does real work. That is on my page about headshot file names. Anything from a headshots session that lands on a site or a profile gets a properly named copy, while the master keeps the name it arrived with.

The check you do once a year.

Backups fail silently. A drive that will not mount, a cloud folder that quietly holds nothing, a synced library that emptied itself after a device swap: all three look normal until the day you go looking. The only defense is to look on purpose, when nothing is at stake.

Attach it to a date already in your life, so it happens without willpower. A birthday works. So does whatever date you do your taxes on.

The check itself takes about ten minutes:

• Plug in the external drive and open one image from it at full size. Not a thumbnail, which can be cached and can lie.
• Open one image from the off-site copy the same way, and confirm you can still get into the account.
• Compare the number of files in each copy. A mismatch is the earliest warning you will get.
• Add the year's new photographs into the same structure while you are in there.
• Replace any drive that is getting old before it stops working, rather than after.

That is the whole ritual. It is boring, which is why it works, and it converts a pile of assumptions into an actual fact once a year.

The copy that needs no password.

Every method above defends files, and files are fragile in a specific way: they need a device, a format and access, and if any one goes, the picture is gone completely. Nothing degrades gracefully.

A print fails differently. A damaged, faded, water-marked print is still a photograph you can look at. It needs no account, no software and no password, and it survives every change of technology by not participating in any of them. For the handful of pictures you would be sorry to lose, the most reliable backup available is a physical one.

That is a good argument for putting one on a wall, where it is useful rather than filed, and my wall art sizing page covers how to work out the right size for the room. It is a better argument for a book, which holds a sequence rather than a single frame and actually gets picked up, argued on my page about albums and heirloom books.

One last thing that nobody thinks about. An archive only one person can find is an archive with a hidden expiry date on it. Tell somebody else where the copies live and how to get into them. It costs one sentence and it is the difference between photographs that outlast you and photographs that do not.

None of this is specific to portraits. It applies to the pictures on your phone and to the shoebox in a cupboard. But it applies with particular force to a session you deliberately arranged, because those are the pictures you are least likely to be able to make again. My professional headshots guide covers planning the session, and the investment page covers what comes with one.