This week, hundreds of photographers gathered at the annual Photography Show in Birmingham to share experiences and to learn about the latest technology available in the photography industry. Research points to an exponential growth in the number of digital images being captured, with global consumers set to take more than one trillion digital photos in 2017 alone. As an industry that was revolutionised by digitalisation, photographers know that the storage and management of data is paramount for their business and customers. Whether you are a professional or an amateur photographer, in this blog post we include tips for how to keep your images and data safe, organised and accessible.
Regardless of their intended purpose, image-based businesses need to keep their images secure and available at all times. Photographers are often side-lined during international discussions of copyright infringement and plagiarism. Whilst image sharing is useful for a photographer to gain exposure to customers and publications, photographers are often having both their product and professional skills used without permission or citation.
Nevertheless, hiding your photographs due to this threat is not an option. Therefore, photographers need to tread a fine line between promoting and protecting their images online. A common tip is to add a watermark and insist on being credited for all your photos that are posted or shared by others. Furthermore, you should be wary of your sharing permissions when posting on a photo-sharing platform. Remember, there are different levels of ownership regarding content. For more information visit this page about Creative Commons policies.
Safeguarding your images on the cloud
An image-based business makes its living from the visuals it creates. Storing these photos on secure servers is therefore a must if you want to protect and access them whenever necessary. These servers should ideally be located in secure data centres that are mirrored in several countries so that your images are always available and backed up. Furthermore, to prevent illegitimate access to your brand visuals or personal photos, make sure that the server you use has a proper Secure Socket Layer (SSL) and ISO certificate in order to prevent hackers from gaining access to these files.
Presenting your photography portfolio
To help your photography business grow, it is important to present your work in a tidy format that allows for maximum exposure. Our 1&1 cloud app centre provides a user friendly solution that caters to these needs. For example, Coppermine is a multi-purpose web gallery that is based on PHP, MySQL and the Gdlib and Image Magick graphics libraries. Coppermine provides a large number of features such as automatic creation of thumbnails and template systems. This allows you to categorise photos and albums with full multimedia support, whilst uploading photos to your database can be done quickly through batch processing. For more information on the apps available at the 1&1 Cloud App Centre, please click here.