Hi everybody, a very warm welcome to Episode 46 of the Photography Explained Podcast. In this episode, my step-by-step guide to how I get the photos off my camera, open brackets safely and securely close bracket.

I’m your host, Rick, and each week I will try to explain one photographic thing to you in plain English in less than 10 minutes without the irrelevant details. My aim is to explain things in just enough detail to help you and me with our photography and no more.

So who am I? I am a professionally qualified photographer based in England with a lifetime of photographic experience, which I share with you on my podcast. I am quite old, so I’ve got quite a lot of experience.

Right, then this is take four of my step-by-step guide to how I get the photos off my camera safely and securely. Now I added the words safely and securely because it would have just been, insert card into computer, import, job done.

There’s more to it than that, things I want to share with you that I’ve learned over the years.

So let’s do the written answer bit.

I get the photos off my camera by inserting the memory card directly into a slot on my PC. I import the photos into Lightroom, which at the same time makes a backup of the import on a separate hard drive. I apply some presets to the photos in Lightroom, and also carry out a cloud backup, I copy the photos to a hard drive stored off-site before I delete the photos on the memory card.

I always have three separate sets of images in separate locations.

You can listen to the episode here

Or keep on reading. Or do both. Entirely up to you!

What I do

And that’s the key thing really, I don’t just import the photos from a memory card, and then delete them off the memory card. No – I have spares because I’m working commercially, I need to do that.

You don’t have to do this

I’m not saying you have to do all of these things. But this is the accepted good practice, you have got them on a hard drive, a separate hard drive stored somewhere else and also on the cloud.

So you are never ever going to lose all your photos.

Okay, this is what I do. As I said, you don’t have to do it. But if you follow what I do, you will never have a problem with losing images, which I’ve never had, thankfully.

Now I know this sounds painful, but once you get into the routine of it, it becomes second nature. And I do genuinely do this all the time with all my photos.

Memory card cases

Now, I will mention the yellow case, the red case, and the soft case. The yellow case contains blank memory cards, which have been formatted in camera and are ready for use. Once I’ve taken some photos, I will put them in the red case. Now that might be at the end of the shoot, it might be at the end of the day, could be anything.

I don’t just fill up one memory card, then start another one. So I’m reducing the risk of having a corrupt memory card and losing everything.

Once I’ve edited photos and they’re on the hard drives, I then put the card/ cards in a soft case which I store in my office.

So that’s the three cases. We’ll come back to that during the steps.

Step one, I import the photos from the red case into Lightroom.

One card at a time. I have a single Lightroom catalogue with all my photos in – just one catalogue. It’s nice and easy. I know where everything is. And it makes life so much better. I did at one point in the past end up with more than one catalogue and it was a nightmare.

When I import the photos, I apply some import presets, which are ones I’ve set in Lightroom. I’ll come on to these in a separate episode. I think I’m doing processing images next week. I’m saying I think, I know I should know this!

Yep, come back next week. Next episode. Sorry, I do more than one episode per week – I keep forgetting.

I apply import presets in Lightroom. I import the photos into a folder called import. And then it sorts them by date. And I know where they are on import.

Where are the photos?

Now the photos are stored in my Lightroom catalogue but are actually on an external hard drive. When I import the photos into Lightroom it makes a duplicate set which is on my computer hard drive. This all sounds rather complicated, but this is all automated – I put the memory card in the computer, a couple of clicks and this all happens.

Patience is a virtue

Now It takes time for all these things to happen because I am asking Lightroom and my computer to do a lot. What I do is I start off the import, then I go and do something else, I don’t sit there and wait. I’ll go and make a cup of tea, have a beer, a glass of wine, maybe something to eat – who knows (or cares).

But I don’t stress about the time it takes for Lightroom to do all these things, I just know it’s gonna take time.

And I’m fine with that.

Step two – Enter the soft case

Once all the photos are imported, I put that single memory card in the soft case, which goes in an office drawer. Obviously, if there’s more than one memory card, they all go in the same case. This is so I know that these photos have been imported.

I don’t want to re-import them again.

I know Lightroom is clever, and it can tell if the duplicates or not. But I just like to keep things as simple as I can.

Step three – what do I do with the photos on the cards?

Well, once I’ve imported the photos into Lightroom, I copy them to an external hard drive, which I tend to do once a week. And that is stored off-site. When I’ve done that, I then delete the photos on the memory cards. And then they go into the yellow case, formatted and ready for use.

And that’s the only way I ever delete photos – by formatting the memory card using the camera I’m going to use the cards in next.

Very important.

Where do I put the photos?

As I said, in a single Lightroom catalogue on an external hard drive.

Why an external hard drive?

Well, the answer is that the hard drive on my PC is a 1TB hard drive, and I filled that absolutely ages ago. So putting the photos on a 4TB hard drive was one of the best things I ever did. It means my PC runs nicely and there’s always plenty of space on it.

And I haven’t had a problem since I’ve done this.

Step five – file structure in Lightroom.

I’m going to come back to this in another episode. Let’s just fire up Lightroom. Now, I say firing up to see how many photos I’ve got – 82,864 photos in this single catalogue. So I need to be able to find them.

I’ve come up with my own file structure. Now we don’t need to overthink these things. I’ve overthought this, I’ve come up with a very complicated system. I have since come up with a very simple system, which works for me. So now I can find my photos in the Lightroom catalogue without using any fancy plugins just fine.

Step six – back up the catalogue.

Every time I shut Lightroom down, I back up the catalogue.

Step seven – delete the backups

With all those backups, it’s very, very important that you do this – delete old backups. Now I only need the last backup, I don’t need the backup before that. So every now and then, when I remember to, I delete the old backups.

This is the backups from closing Lightroom, and also the import duplicates. Because these just clog up the hard drive, and they’re just duplicates. This needs keeping on top of because you can very quickly take up a couple of 100 gigabytes worth of photos. Not that I take that many photos.

Okay, let’s summarise this one.

I have everything in three places – from the time when I import them into my computer that is. Obviously, once I have taken the photos that is all I have, I’ve only got one memory card slot in my Canon 6D.

Up to that point, I just have one set of photos on memory cards, which is why I split my shoot over a number of cards to reduce the risk of losing everything due to one catastrophic card failure.

The Lightroom catalogue.

So the photos are in the Lightroom catalogue on an external hard drive, with a duplicate import on the PC. Memory cards are copied to an offsite stored hard drive.

Then I can format the memory cards. And the third thing is not on my list, which is quite helpful

Step eight- cloud backup

I pay for cloud backup of everything on my PC, which runs in the background all the time. I use Backblaze, and it cost me $5 a month. And it’s just automatic in the background, and that’s what I do. Okay, a couple of follow-ups here.

Why do I do this? Because I had problems in the past and nearly had a big loss of data. I have had a computer crash and I’m now hopefully in a good place.

A couple of side points.

How big are my memory cards?

I use 16 and 32-GB memory cards – I don’t have massive memory cards. I don’t take that many photos. Less is more. But I don’t want to have 1000s of photos on one memory card, in case that memory card fails.

Have I had a card failure?

I’ve never had a memory card fail by the way. But it’s worth taking these precautions.

If you think about the time invested in getting photos. This is very important.

What about card readers?

I’ve had loads of card readers. I don’t know a good one from a bad one. I’m not gonna lie to you. Thankfully, my PC has an SD card reader built in which is great.

Okay, one-line summary.

You need a system to safely and securely manage the digital files that are your precious photos. Yeah, I wrote that.

Okay, what do I want you to do now?

1 Let me know your thoughts please on Twitter.

You can find me – I’m @rickphoto.

2 Subscribe to my podcast.

If you enjoyed this episode, of course, this helps me.

3 Rate and review my podcast.

Again. If you enjoyed this episode, this helps me too.

4 Tell someone you know about my podcast.

This helps me very much and is very much appreciated.

Okay, 10 minutes. We’re over it. Still, the explainy bit isn’t. So that’s how I get around that one.

Next episode.

Having spoken about this I’ve actually gone through a logical process here which is quite a surprise. So we’re gonna get straight into the next logical thing, which is my step by step guide to how I edit my photos in Lightroom.

And I’m just going to be staring at Lightroom talking to you.

Thank you.

Thank you very much for listening to my small perfectly formed podcast. Check out my website, Rick McEvoy Photography where you can find out all about me and my architectural and construction photography work, as well as my photography blog, where you can learn lots more about photography on me if you want.

Photography Explained Podcast website

Also, please check out my Photography Explained Podcast website where you can find out how to ask me a question, find the list of episodes and also things I’m going to explain in future episodes.

And the website is up to date and complete which I’m absolutely delighted with and really benefiting from not spending all that time working on it.

This episode was brought to you very much by the power of water – yes, I’m trying to embrace water

I’ve been Rick McEvoy. Thanks again very much for listening to me and for giving me 12 and three-quarter minutes of your valuable time. I’ll see you in the next episode.

Cheers from me, Rick

OK – that was the podcast episode.

Want to know more?

Head over to the Start page on the Photography Explained Podcast website to find out more.

And here is the list of episodes published to date – you can listen to any episode straight from this page which is nice.

Let me know if there is a photography thing that you want me to explain and I will add it to my list. Just head over to the This is my list of things to explain page of this website to see what is on there already.

Let me send you stuff

I send out a weekly email to my subscribers. It is my take on one photography thing, plus what I have been writing and talking about. Just fill in the box and you can get my weekly photographic musings straight to your inbox. Which is nice.

And finally a little bit about me

Finally, yes this paragraph is all about me – check out my Rick McEvoy Photography website to find out more about me and my architectural, construction, real estate and travel photography work. I also write about general photography stuff, all in plain English without the irrelevant detail.

Thank you

Thanks for listening to my podcast (if you did) and reading this blog post (which I assume you have done as you are reading this).

Cheers from me Rick