If there’s one question photographers ask me more than almost anything else, it’s:
“What do you do with all your photos?”
After 18 years of photographing families, personal brands, businesses and events, this is the photography storage workflow I rely on to keep every client image safe.
I’ve never been someone who likes deleting RAW files. Storage costs money, but for me the cost of recreating a shoot – or wishing I still had the originals years later – is much higher.
So here’s exactly how I store my client work.
My Storage Workflow
I keep things deliberately simple.
📸 Current shoots
As soon as I get home from a shoot, I copy everything onto a fast portable SSD.
I edit directly from this drive because Lightroom works great from an SSD.
The SSD I currently recommend:
👉 SanDisk Extreme Portable SSD (2TB)
If you’re shooting high volumes regularly, I’d go for the 4TB version instead.
👉 SanDisk Extreme Portable SSD (4TB)
📦 Completed shoots
Once I’ve delivered the images, I move the entire job onto a large archive hard drive.
This keeps my editing drive nice and fast while still allowing me to keep every RAW file.
I usually recommend buying the largest drive you can comfortably afford, as they often work out much better value per terabyte.
At the moment I think 12TB-18TB is the sweet spot.
My current recommendation:
👉 Seagate Expansion Desktop 16TB
☁️ Backup
This is the bit I never skip.
One hard drive is not a backup.
Hard drives fail.
They get dropped.
They become corrupted.
I back everything up to Backblaze.
It runs quietly in the background and means that if one of my drives ever dies, my client work is still safe.
I’ve been using Backblaze for years and it’s one of those subscriptions I never question paying for.
Why I Don’t Delete RAW Files
Many photographers ask whether they should delete RAW files to save storage space. My answer is usually no.
I get it. With storage prices rising recently, I’ve seen more photographers talking about deleting older RAW files.
Everyone’s different, but I’ve always preferred to keep mine.
Technology changes. Clients come back years later asking for different product orders, and images become useful again for anniversaries, rebrands or publications.
AI editing tools keep improving too, meaning old RAW files often become even more valuable over time.
For me, keeping the originals gives me options.
Storage costs money. Recreating a shoot isn’t usually an option.
Do You Need a NAS?
People ask me this all the time.
Personally?
I’ve never felt the need.
NAS systems are brilliant for some photographers, particularly if you’re editing across multiple computers, sharing files with a team or working with huge amounts of video.
For my business though, I’ve always preferred a simpler workflow:
✔ Portable SSD for current work
✔ Large archive hard drives for completed work
✔ Backblaze for cloud backup
It does everything I need without adding extra complexity.
My Storage Philosophy
I’ve never really thought of hard drives as an expense.
I think of them as insurance.
A large archive drive can hold years of client work and often costs less than the value of a single photography booking.
For me, that’s money well spent.
The Gear I Use
If you’re wondering which drives, SD cards and editing kit I actually use, I’ve put everything together on one page that I keep updated throughout the year.
👉 My Top Gear Picks for Photographers
One final thought…
There isn’t one perfect storage solution for every photographer.
This is simply the workflow that’s evolved over 18 years of running my business.
It’s straightforward, reliable and, most importantly, means I can sleep at night knowing my clients’ memories are safe.