Recently, I had one of my backup hard drives fail on me, and it reminded me that my archiving and backup setup for my photography needs some work. While I do have a comprehensive solution for client work, my personal projects are in a somewhat precarious state. Ideally, you should have your important data backed up in at least three places, but I suspect many people don’t do that. However, it occurred to me that I actually have multiple cloud services that I probably don’t fully utilise, so after a little thinking I came up with a way to doubly and triple protect my work going forward. It involves using Apple Photos and Lightroom desktop.

A little preamble

If you’re a full-time professional photographer, you undoubtedly have a local NAS dive and an offsite backup and multiple hard drives floating around, right? Anytime anyone mentions this in various forums, people often say something like: “just buy more hard drives, storage is cheap” or something like that. Except, it’s not that cheap because whatever you think you need, you’ll need at least twice that. So yes, you can buy a 20 tb drive for around €450 and back up your photos onto that, but that is incredibly dangerous. You will at the very least require another one to act as a backup of your backup. So now you’re nearly at a €1000 and in this day and age, with prices ever on the rise, and everyone already paying a fortune for subscriptions, and you know, food and electricity, €1000 can be a big initial outlay for the average enthusiast.

Of course, the long-term investment is worth it, but as a short-term option, there are other solutions, and in some cases you may have them already. Even if you don’t consider these as long-term options, they can be a way to back up your most important work at least temporarily. You could also consider this as something for only your most important projects. If you’re doing this for thousands of inmates, you’re going to run out of cloud storage pretty quickly, but for a short-term option to absolutely make sure you have your images backed up, it is an option. It also offers the advantage of giving you access to your images remotely.

The Goal

So in my case, while I also back up onto an external drive on my old Mac Pro that I use as a server, I also want a cloud-based backup. But that in itself raises more questions. Do I want the raw files too? How do I want to access the finished images? How do I keep edits intact? Well, the way I do it (now) is as follows:

When I finish editing a project or a shoot, even if it's just me out for the day with my camera, I do the following:

I Export Finished Jpegs from Lightroom and import them into Photos (Where they get backed up to iCloud)
Export my 5 Star Raw files from a finished project from Lightroom Classic into Lightroom Desktop, where they get backed up to the Adobe Cloud. (More on this in a minute)

Step 1: The Finished Jpegs to Photos

Most of the time, you only ever really need a flattened and finished version of your edited images. For maximum quality, you could of course export TIFFS, but this would fill up your iCloud storage pretty quickly. If you use Jpegs set at 100% the quality is still mostly perfect (you can get some issues with gradients etc.) and will suffice for most images. You can still export TIFFS for really important projects or shoots.

screenshot of Apple Photos showing image backed up from Lightroom

I don’t export every image in a shoot or project. When I’m editing I usually mark the keepers as 5 stars in Lightroom, and then when the project is finished, I will export those 5-star images from Lightroom as full resolution maximum quality jpegs. I use a temporary folder on my system disk (in the pictures folder) and then I import them into Photos. You can set up automations to speed this process up.

When importing to Photos, I make sure to choose the option to import to a new Album, and then I label the album the same as the project was in Lightroom. Once you import the images, Photos will upload them into the cloud. Of course this depends on how much cloud space you have, but JPEGS don’t take up a massive amount of space, so you should get quite a few. But as I said earlier, this is more of a short-term solution, and it’s better than nothing.

Step 2 - Back Up Raw files to Lightroom Desktop (the cloud version of Lightroom)

If you’re already using Lightroom desktop, then you don’t need to do this step, as it’s already done for you. However, if you’re a Lightroom classic user, then there’s actually a little trick to get your RAW files into Lightroom Desktop/Cloud that keeps the edits intact, and syncs full res photos. There are a couple of caveats, though.

Obviously you need a good bit of storage, so if you have the cheaper subscriptions, this is probably not going to work.
If you sync images to Lightroom Classic from the Cloud already, this is also not really going to work. If you have syncing turned on in classic it will just end up duplicating your files, so while you will have them backed up, it will use twice as much space on your computer. I currently don’t have syncing turned on for this reason, and just use Lightroom Desktop as a standalone application, and only use that to sync to the cloud.
You need to make sure you have the option to sync sidecar files to disk turned on in the preferences in Lightroom classic.
This only works properly on a Mac. It should work on Windows, but I’ve had people in the past tell me they can’t get it to work.
For convenience, make sure Lightroom Desktop is in your doc, or Running

Once you are ready to go here’s what do to. I generally do this once I have finished a project.

Step 1

In Lightroom classic, choose to filter your project by 5 stars or whatever other way you use to mark your keepers. If it’s the flag, use that.

Step 2

Once you have filtered the project down to your selects, then in the grid mode, select all (Command + A)

Step 3

Drag the files from the Lightroom classic window onto the icon for Lightroom Desktop (LR) in the dock. This should then switch to Lightroom Desktop and bring up the import window. You can also just drag from one window to the other.

Screenshot of the Lightroom import dialog box

Step 4

At the top of the import window there is the option to import to an Album. If you select the “New” option from the popup menu you can create a new album to import the image into. This makes it easier to organise at a later date. Choose Add xxx photos (where xxx is the number of photos) to import the images into Lightroom Desktop. Once they have imported they will upload to the cloud and then over time you will only have previews left locally depending on how your cache is set up.

Below is a quick video showing this process.

Conclusion

As mentioned in the title, this is a slightly ridiculous way to back up your images, and it’s also really only useful short term. It’s not perfect for archival, as the cost of cloud services is ever increasing. But if you have an account already, and you have the storage, then it is at least a way to make sure your most important projects are backed up.

The other advantage of this is you can access your finished images quickly from your phone or iPad through Photos, and you can get to your RAW files through the Lightroom App. So if you ever need to get to an image quickly and you aren’t near your main computer, you have access. So a backup with benefits!