A Photographers Nightmare, Deleting all Photos

One of a photographer’s worst nightmares must be to lose all their photos from a PC or storage device which are subsequently irretrievable.

This must have happened thousands of times over the years although with the many back-up and storage options now available this should really be a thing of the past.

Unfortunately, this is exactly what happened to one photographer who recently lost all 9000 plus photographs from their computer hard drive.

The photographer posted their dilemma on Reddit to see if any users could offer advice.

User Apricot_Brief wrote that they had been doing photography for about a year. When they went on the laptop to edit some photographs, the desktop had completely changed and the photos were no longer in the location they should be. The user believed the laptop had automatically updated overnight.

It seems a strange scenario but the folder was located and to seemingly move it to a more accessible location, created a new folder and moved the photos to there. However, the photos copied across, so doubling the number of photos and reducing space on the hard drive. Rather than simply deleting the original folder, the photographer somehow deleted all of them and couldn’t retrieve them. 12 months of work gone in a few seconds.

Of course we would expect the photos to be in the Deleted Items folder. However, this didn’t seem to be the case. After attempting to retrieve the photographs, unsuccessfully we might add, the photographer went to Reddit to see if this had happened to anyone else and to ask for advice.

The main advice from other users was to stop using the laptop straight away and take it to an expert who may be able to retrieve using specialist software or restore to a time prior to the photos being deleted.

Of course this should never happen in this day and age, particularly for a professional photographers whose likelihood relies on secure data. With any computer or digital related business, the moto should always be back up, back, back up! So please make sure your business-critical data is always secure. Not only is this important for your own business, but as a photographer you are capturing once in a lifetime events for your clients and to lose this would be devasting to your client and massively damaging to your reputation.

It is good to know the photographer in question has learnt from their mistakes and now has a storage device to as back up. However, this is taking action ‘after the horse has bolted’. Please don’t be this person and take risks with your wedding photography business!