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What’s the one tip you’d give yourself starting out as a photographer?
There’s nothing quite like the power of hindsight, especially when it comes to some of those golden life tips you pick up along the way that would made your everyday a lot easier if you had known them when you were younger. While we don’t have the ability to travel back in time and give ourselves the helping hand that could have made all the difference, we do have the power to pass on these little nuggets of brilliance to people who are following a similar path to yours. So, here’s your chance to help and give some advice that could benefit someone who is just starting out as a photographer and allow them to take the next steps in their journey. Now, as I’ve said before, I am not in any way, shape, or form a professional photographer, but I have taken a lot of photographs over the years and made my fair share of mistakes along the way. When I first started to take photographs, I was using an analogue camera, with actual film in it, and I can’t tell you the amount of times I took a photo that didn’t turn out anything like I thought it would. So for me, the one tip that I would give myself now, would be to take more than one photo. This is, of course, a lot easier to do now than it was back then. Digital cameras and smart phones are awesome and being able to instantly see your photo and not being restricted to the amount of shots you can take because you’re running out of film is a huge plus for making sure you get awesome shots. I say, get totally snap happy, and when you think you’ve got enough photos, take some more, even if you think you’ve already got the ultimate shot, because you’ll never know if the next one will turn out better, unless you take it. I also pretty much exclusively use my phone for taking photos, and thanks to Camera uploads I can keep my phone memory relatively clear and make sure I never accidentally delete the best photo of the bunch. So, now over to you, if there was one tip you would give yourself when you were starting out as a photographer, what would if be?
What you need to know about storing and backing up your photos with Dropbox
We see a lot of questions about storing, sharing and backing up your photos on Dropbox so here are some tips to make that as easy as possible! Back up photos automatically to your Dropbox account You know we love an automatic process, so whether it’s your camera roll photos, your screenshots or your document scans, your cloud photos are some of the most important files you have. In fact our own Emmet told us about a time when he almost lost his photos due to a tech malfunction - “One of my old hard drives of photos got corrupted several years ago. This was almost a year of photos. Thankfully, lot of these had been saved to my Dropbox account automatically, and this was important as a couple who I was friends with wanted a high definition photo of them from the first night they went out together, and I was only able to share it on their wedding day because it was saved on Dropbox.“ Keeping full-resolution copies backed up with online photo storage means you can access them anytime, and you know there is a safe and secure copy in the cloud. Here are just a few ways Dropbox can keep your photos safe: Camera uploads: Once you turn this on, photos from your phone or tablet will be automatically backed up to Dropbox. Or in our desktop app, photos will be copied from cameras, memory cards, or mobile devices whenever you connect one to your computer. Screenshot backups: You can set up our desktop app to automatically move screenshot images to your Dropbox, or have mobile device screenshots backed up using camera uploads. Document scanning: The native/built-in scan functionality in the Dropbox mobile app lets you use your phone’s camera to scan and make digital backups of receipts, whiteboards, and paper documents. Share your photos with links, shared folders and control access Storing your photos is great, but chances are you will want to share some - whether it’s with family members, teammates or the expense team at work. There are a few ways you can do that, and you can manage the access with a few clicks as well. Shared links: You can easily create a link to share any file or folder in your Dropbox. Copy and paste your link into an email, text message, or chat, to share with anyone—even if they don’t have a Dropbox account. Access control: Keep your photos in the right hands by adding password protection, expiration dates, and sign-in requirements to your shared links. Shared folders: Want to collect your photos and someone else’s in the same place? Share files back and forth by inviting other people to sync a folder between your account and theirs. Organize your photos: Saving and sharing your photos can be great but it’s no use if you can’t find the one your looking for, so organizing and viewing your photos is essential too! Here are some tips on how to do that, and if that’s not enough you can see how our own Eliene organizes her photos. Photo browsing: View and browse all of your photos and videos from the Photos tab in our mobile app or on the web. Image previews: View over 35 image file types from dropbox.com or our mobile app. You can preview common files like JPEG, PNG, TIFF, and GIF; app-specific types like Photoshop and Illustrator; raw formats like CR2, DCR, and DNG; and even iOS HEIC photos. Best of all, there’s no need for special photo software. Image tagging: Find your photos fast by adding searchable hashtags to individual photos or an entire folder. How do you manage your photos with Dropbox? Share your tips in the comments below, or if you have any questions you, we can answer those too!Organize and share Christmas photos with Dropbox
Christmas is definitely a time of year that I find myself taking more pictures than normal. Meeting up with family and friends and wanting to capture special moments means that I have my camera on more than I don’t. If you’re anything like me, you’ll want to be able to share all of these photos with those closest to you. Social media can be a good way to share photos, but there are definitely times when we might want to keep these photos within a private group of people, especially when family are involved, Dropbox makes it easy to share with exactly who you want. To start with, I’ll always make sure that my camera uploads are turned on. You’ve probably heard me talking about this a few times here in the Photographers group before, but I’ll stand by my words again because I love this feature, it saves me time, space on my phone and makes sure I never lose any photos, so it’s a no brainer for me. If you don’t know how to turn on Camera uploads you can find all the information you need right here. Now that all my photos will be automatically added to my Dropbox account, I’ll figure out a way to organize all of the photos I take at Christmas into folders. Generally speaking, I’ll be meeting up with a lot of different groups of people on different days, so I’ll only want to share photos with the people that are in them, so I’ll start by making a Christmas folder, then inside that I’ll make folders for Christas Eve, Christmas Day, Stephen’s Day, New Years Eve and any other days I might be out and about. Then, dependent on what I’m doing, I might make different folders within these daily folders, for example I might do Christmas morning swim and Christmas Dinner, or Stephen’s Day lunch and Stephen’s Day drinks. Once I’ve got my folders created and all my photos put in the right place, it makes it really easy to share with all of the other people who I was with. To do this, all I need to do is create a view-only shared link to the folder I want to share, and share it with everyone who I was with when I took those photos, or anyone else I want to see them. This link will allow anyone with access to it to view and download the photos inside that folder. If you’re not sure how to create shared links, you can find out everything you need to know here. Now, if your friends and family are anything like mine, you’ll know there are 2 types of people, those who take photos and those don’t. When I want to add photos that friends or family took to my collection, I use file request. This allows them to simply add their photos, which then go directly to my Dropbox account, allowing me to easily add them to the folder they belong in. You can find out more about using file request here. When it comes to using Dropbox for organizing photographs, there are literally hundreds of things you can do, and everyone uses it a little different to everyone else. Check out how our very own Sheena used Dropbox to help create a Christmas Family Calendar for another awesome example. We’d really love to hear how you plan on using Dropbox to organize your photos this Christmas, let us know in a comment below.
Here's how our Community Manager Emmet uses Dropbox to manage photographs
We really want to hear all about how you use Dropbox as photographers, so I guess it's only fair that before you tell us your stories, we tell you one of ours. Our very own Emmet has been part of the Community team here at Dropbox for the best part of the last 2 years but in a past life, he was a photographer and had a serious process for organizing his photos and files to make sure he saved those memories for everyone else too. Check his story out below. For about 5 years, I worked as photographer for University College Cork, providing photos and other creative content for the student societies in the college. There were over 100 individual societies in the college, and I would photography over a dozen events each week. During my 5+ years working in UCC, I uploaded over 250GB of photos, videos and graphics, for students, and the college, to use and share as part of their activities. Organising that many photos, videos and more could have been a bit of a nightmare, but thankfully Dropbox was there to help keep everything organised. I created individual folders to house the content for each society and created sub-folders inside these for each event. I would share these folders with the society/societies involved, and they would use this content for promotion, and sharing on their social media channels. This allowed me to keep everything organised and easy to find. At the end of each year, I would create a new folder to contain all the events that year, and ensure I could easily find them in the next year. Dropbox proved an invaluable tool over my years as a photographer, and allowed me to quickly access all of the photos based on the host of the event, time of the event etc. At the end of each year, I would create a compilation video, celebrating the hard work of all the student societies. When I was creating this, I found the Photo tab on Dropbox invaluable, as I would be able to see the thousands of photos I took every year, and quickly pick out my favourites for the video. It was an amazing tool for organizing my files then - and still is today, so it’s great to be able to use it at work everyday now. In fact, Emmet’s filing system was so good that he managed to dig out a 10 year old photo he took of fellow Community team member Amy on her first day of college - not knowing their paths had crossed before, Dropbox is really amazing sometimes! So, that's how Emmet uses Dropbox to sort his photographs, now we'd love to hear your number one tip for using Dropbox as a photographer.
