ABSTRACT
As much of a professional photographer’s future income will come from legacy images, it makes sense to take good care of all images, to archive them and to catalogue them in a form that allows easy retrieval. Photographers shooting film will need to use conservation quality materials and archival storage for their negatives and transparencies. Online storage is becoming a popular solution - this puts the reader’s files in storage on remote servers. Any photographer entering a contract would be wise to look at the insurance values for lost material and the possibility of compensation claims. The generally accepted ‘archival’ storage solution has been DVDs or CDs, with the major recommendation that read-only disks are used and that CD-R, CD-RW and all re-writeable DVD formats are not suitable for long-term storage. External hard drives were once not considered sufficiently reliable for long-term storage, but technology has improved and many photographers now use hard drives for online access to archival material.
