Family photos are priceless and intensely personal.
We don’t want just anyone to view the sacred and intimate moments of our lives – so we are careful about sharing our photos with others.
Perhaps you want someone to help you organize your photos, or create an album. But you’re reluctant to hire a professional without assurance that they’ll keep your photos private and protected.
At Picture This Organized, we understand the gravity of trusting someone with your photo collection. Here are three reasons why you can feel confident when you hire Picture This Organized as your professional photo organizing team.
1. We Keep Your Photos Private
We consider it a privilege and a joy to get to know our clients and their family members through their photos and stories.
But we know they trust us to keep their photos private, so we begin by asking every client their personal preferences about how they want to share their photos with us, and with their family members. When we know the client’s preferences, we can make recommendations to suit their needs.
To keep photos private on various photo storage or sharing sites, we recommend that our clients purchase paid accounts. This allows us to set up and organize photo libraries in contained environments.
Apple Photos is an example of a self-contained, private photo library. Clients give us remote access to organize their digital photo library as an approved “device” in their iCloud account. We only have access to their Photos library, but no access to private information.
SmugMug is a paid website photo sharing service we set up for clients. It features strong privacy and security settings and lets you control who can see your photos. You can read more about how SmugMug family photo sites work in this previous post.
If clients want us to download photos from other photo storage accounts (e.g. Dropbox, Shutterfly, and Amazon accounts), we help them adjust their settings accordingly.
We are aware that some people may have some personal, sensitive, or even adult-oriented photos in their collections. If that’s the case, don’t give us photos you don’t want us to see. But do let us know if you need help removing those photos. We can easily walk a client through this process.
Bottom line — we never assume client preferences about public or private access to their photos. We ALWAYS ask!
2. We Keep Your Photos and Information Confidential
Clients can also rest assured that we respect their privacy and that of family members and their stories.
Each staff member carries a high level of personal concern for the safety and security of our clients. We ask every PTO team member to sign a Confidentiality Clause, reaffirming this commitment to confidentiality.
We take pictures of a client’s collection to document the start of a project. We may take more photos along the way that serve as our points of reference for project progress. Our clients appreciate seeing what their project development look like too!
If we post any photos of client projects on our website as educational examples, we always ask permission.
3. We Keep Your Photos Safe and Secure
We’ve also created processes and safeguards to protect our clients’ photos from any exposure to theft or elements.
When we are working on client photo projects, we store all printed photos, albums, slides or home movies in our office. Our clients can rest assured their valuable memories are safe in the Picture This Organized office because:
- Our building doors automatically lock on the weekends, and we lock our office suite when we leave.
- We store client photo collections in a durable, locked cabinet.
- We label External Hard Drives containing photo or video files and store them in a combination safe.
- We lock staff computers making them accessible only with the team member’s unique password.
Back Up
The final layer of protecting client photo files is to back them up! We do this in several ways.
Digitized Files
We scan printed images and add metadata to the photo information (e.g. photo date, location, keywords, facial recognition, etc.). Then we organize and back up digital files.
We’re careful NOT to throw images away (or delete digital images) unless a client tells us to. With the exception of blurry or black images, we ALWAYS ask first before removing duplicate and poor photos.
When there are duplicate photos that clients want to save, we organize in separate storage boxes and digital folders.
Network Attached Storage (NAS)
To increase efficiency and security, we installed a Network Attached Storage unit in our office. This computer data server allows us to gather, store, and update client image files in organized folders, accessible only to our staff. More secure than sharing a “Work in Progress” external hard drive between staff, the NAS also serves as a backup for current and past client files.
External Hard Drive (EHD)
Every client gets their own EHD containing all of their updated images copied from the NAS.
When we gather client files onto an initial EHD, we note the EHD’s purchase date. We buy a new EHD every year or two and move the client’s file onto the new drive, just to make sure the drive is always reliable.
Count On Us to Protect Your Photos
Photos represent decades of memories, and we understand they are precious to our clients.
We don’t want privacy and security concerns to keep clients from receiving help with their photos. We care about the security and privacy of our clients’ photos as much as they do, and work hard to protect them.
That’s why we strive to establish a working relationship in which our clients trust our team and feel confident in our abilities and our work process.
Schedule a free 30-minute consultation to see if we might be the right team to help you with your photo projects.