In this blog I wanted to go over a question that we get quite a bit from both our photographer friends and our clients.
How do you guys deliver photos?
This is a two answer question because at our studio we always have back ups to back ups. First off, what we do with the raw files is the following. After we finish shooting a job, the lead photographer takes the cards from the second photographer. The second photographer takes a card from the lead (we shoot with dual card slots for safety). Those raw files get backed up into two different locations so the full wedding is backed up twice.
Now, once all the selects have been made by our post producer and have been exported to an external hard drive we back them up and deliver in two ways. First we upload them to our galleries for viewing and for delivery via links (we happen to use SmugMug)
That link gets delivered to our clients and they can download, view, and purchase prints. We’re not too heavy on selling prints here as we make more of a living from shooting and I enjoy seeing our past clients hang their photos on their walls more than the money that would bring.
So in order for them to have easy access to print as well as to safely store their photos in case, heaven forbid, something were to happen to us; we use this option. We give our wedding couples a USB drive with their photos for safekeeping
Recently we got an email from USB Memory Direct and we discussed different options for custom USB drives to deliver to our clients. Taylor was super helpful with finding the right type of drive we wanted (we lean towards dark wood), with an imprinted logo on it. They wanted to send us a few to try out, to see how we liked them compared to our previous distributor and I said “let’s do it”. I’m not one to take free stuff because I don’t like anyone having leverage on us but if I truly liked the results I would be more than happy to write a review. Happy to say they came out awesome!
We had done previous USB drives from other companies and they were OK, not great. Speeds were decent but definitely not something to brag about. With the drives we were sent (and which arrived within a few days of ordering), I could tell immediately that they were much faster. We got 16GB drives (typically will fit a wedding with full resolution edits), and it transferred very fast. Definitely faster than the previous ones we had and after formatting it before the transfer, it worked flawlessly.
Our verdict is defintely positive. USB Memory Direct did a great job with what we needed, they were very fast to respond and we’ll definitely be ordering the next batch from there as well. As photographers, giving our couples something that they can physically hang on to is important. A lot of the times we’ll send the links and a couple of years later we’ll have them reach out and ask for it again so at least with this we know they’ll always have a copy of their beautiful memories.
