It must have been, what, 5 days since we were last banging on about the importance of printing photographs. No doubt many of you rolled your eyes. And yet...
If you don't think you've heard of the company Adobe, you know its products. It is the market leader in software for photography. For design. For many other industries (and if not the market leader, it's up there). And you've definitely heard of its most famous product, which, like Hoover or Tippex or Thermos or Frisbee (etc), has become a verb and noun and so on: Photoshop.
But why should you care? And what does this have to do with printing? Quite a lot, actually.
Once upon a time this was how we saved files. In 20 years’ time, will your photos be as accessible as the files on this disc?
A little background. Lightroom is a companion program to Photoshop. It has some processing and editing functionality, but most importantly for professionals (and amateurs, of course) is its catalogue and database capabilities. (Well, being American, catalog...) We use it to manage our images*, so if you call us up and ask us about images we took for you years ago we can find them quickly.
If your job is to act as a catalog(ue) of photographs, it would seem important to keep those photographs safe. Oops.
It seems that an update on the iOS version of Lightroom has deleted all users photographs (as well as other useful things such as presets). As in, permanently deleted with no hope for recovery.
To repeat: a program whose core purpose is to look after photographs has deleted - without backup - all the photographs therein.
So if a program by the biggest software company on photography (excluding Apple and Google, but we'll come to them) can permanently delete your photos without warning, what can you do? And who says a similar glitch won't affect Apple of Google, who probably store most of your photos?
To tie this all in. For the love of photography, backup your images somewhere else (at least 3 different places, such as your computer, a separate hard drive, and one offsite - in a drawer at work or in the cloud). But most importantly:
PRINT YOUR FAVOURITE PHOTOS
Realistically, only two things will badly damage printed images: fire and water. A box of prints under the bed is usually pretty safe, and can be viewed without software (but you do need to look after your eyes).
PSA ends!
*none of our images have been lost. And we have multiple, multiple backups in case something like this happens...