All things photo backing up related with my friends at Macmedics

George and I talked about backing up your photos, the things you need to know about using icloud and common issues that you might absently be doing without realizing it on your iphone.  0min - 4min - Totally irrelevant chatter between George and I about my dog getting groomed and how George’s life is so peaceful because he doesn’t have kids or a dog during covid.   4:10min - Introduced myself and how I work with Macmedics. Macmedics is the company I use to ensure the health of my drives. In my course I dedicate the first two weeks to making sure you have your photos properly backed up and safe before we start digging into the editing process. 5:48min - George introduces himself - Macmedics is a 35 year old company that helps businesses, and home users of apple computers that run more efficiently.   6:42min - I ask George what would most surprise people - in other words what should people know about the most common mistakes we make about backing up our images. We talk about using icloud without understanding how it actually works.  Questions he asks  during an assessment and questions you can ask of yourself at home- are your photos in one place, are they syncing-  9:10min - I take you through how I back up my photos. In short what I do is I have two harddrives - the first is my main hub of all of my photos that is an 8tb drive that backs up automatically because Macmedics set it up that way. I use a laptop so when I get back from a shoot or series of shoots and need to charge my laptop I plug in my drives and let the magic of the set up macmedics do it’s thing.  11:25min - I ask George to talk about why photos won’t print well. He had a great response which was - Photos are like old technology - it’s like watching VHS tapes and how great when you plugged in a VHS tape and it looked amazing. Now if you plug in a VHS tape it would look awful. Simply because the technology we use today no longer works and we get used to seeing things in a certain way.  12:58min - Talks about switching from format to format to format the longer you put backing up or printing your photos means there are additional steps. Imagine if you had a floppy disk and you tried to retrieve photos from me - the steps to take would be numerous and in the end print poorly.  14:24 - How it’s becoming harder and harder to take photos of your old phones and vintage machines. If you have photos on an older computer or older phone it becomes harder to access those photos over time.  15:28min - Lots of times people feel worried about printing because they worry about an act of nature - ie, house fire etc. but, the likelihood of that happening versus computers crashing. I asked George to speak to that point of how often people lose their photos. What he found is that it’s not the computer malfunctioning, it's more of a user issue where people are deleting photos from one device and icloud deletes them across the board.  20min - George talked about how people have small travel harddrives with all of their most precious information - think wedding photos, child’s first steps etc beside a big glass of water.  If you look at the manufacturer's warranty you will see those travel drives are  21:33min - if you find yourself in this position - George recommends seagate or western digital drive. Drives costs $100 - his top recommendation is have more than one drive. Spend $200 get more than one drive. Maybe buy three even and have one drive that lives in your car so you can avoid natural disasters. It feels like a lot of money but think about what it would feel like losing those photos and how much would you spend on fixing it.  24:13min - 31min - Icloud - I asked who should use icloud and what you should use it for? 

• A big issue associated with having so many devices attached to the same icloud account and the issues associated with that.

31min - Is icloud eating your photos and what does that mean? 35min - How to pull photos from the cloud and how long it will take 36 min - a switch on your phone that people often flip that results in your photos not actually  printing. The danger of using different fancy formats for photos. 

by Emily Doukogiannis

Emily Doukogiannis is a Toronto-based portrait photographer, expert storyteller and compulsive photo book maker. Her commitment to telling people's stories is something Emily does in her spare time via Emily D 4 Change and countless media outlets.

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