The archiving of our images has always been a very important thing to us. I’m not exactly sure why this is other than I know most professional photographers in the days of analogue were passionate about never losing their negatives. I’m no exception and still have every negative I ever shot from the days of film. Including everything I shot at college and that’s a while ago!

A lot of our work in analogue days was on colour transparency so there was no original to retain but every black and white and colour negative still remains on file.

Being early adopters of the digital format, we have still to this day retained every image ever captured. Both edited and the original raw captures. Actually, we have on file a lot of Photoshop work we did before digital cameras came to the fore as we used to run a lot of our work through high end drum scanning from colour transparencies and prints in order to take advantage of the new found ability to refine images using computers, which predated practical professional digital cameras by a few years.

This means that through the years we have gone from the storage of all images by an array of technologies. Film negatives, optical drives, CDs, DVDs, Blurays and now hard drives with thankfully, ever increasing storage capacities.

For the last ten years or so we have also duplicated all storage as well, so that if there ever is a storage medium failure, we do have the data in a second place. The decision to do this was reinforced by a hard drive failure on one of the backup drives some years ago, which was fortunately recoverable, albeit at not inconsiderable expense.

We aren’t under obligation to archive our images but it’s a service we’ve always offered and our clients make use of it remarkably often. In many ways we’ve shot ourselves in the foot with this as in the days of film, if a job was shot on colour transparency, when the client lost the transparencies it was always a reshoot. This used to happen more often than you might think. Transparencies were transported between client, agency and repro house and in the rush of deadlines the opportunity for the original material to go missing was quite high.
Aside from providing a valuable service to our clients I also just cannot bring myself to ever willingly permanently delete image data. I guess it’s the magpie in me.