Photographers all face the same set of issues in their profession. If you are a photographer and have any of the following questions, keep reading this post, as I'm sure you'll love the answers that follow.

  • What's the best way to store my photos?
  • What's the most secure way to share photos with a client?
  • How can I make sure there are backups of my photos in case of a disaster?
  • Where can I store RAW photos and exported JPEGs as well without losing the original quality?
  • What if I want to store videos or documents as well?
  • I don't just want storage, I want a gallery that shows my photos off to my clients!
Professional photography - google drive

What is Google Workspace?

Before we dig into the various features that a photographer might need from Google Workspace, we thought it would be best to briefly educate the reader on what it has to offer. Google Workspace (formerly G Suite - formerly Google Apps) is an online business management suite complete with:

  • Docs, a complete word processor
  • Sheets, a powerful spreadsheet application
  • Slides, a presentation maker
  • Google Drive, a cloud storage solution
  • Gmail, a powerful email management platform
  • Google Calendar, a powerful calendar solution
  • Meet, a complete video conferencing platform
  • and a lot more...

The merits of Google Workspace for photographers

Before I answer the above questions, it's important to lay a bit of groundwork. First, this post is written to encourage the reader to try Google Workspace for their business. There are other strong options but we feel that they all pale in comparison to Google's offerings. If you're just looking for a good comparison of Google Worspace's features to other services click here. We're just wanting to extol the merits of Google Workspace in this article.

What's the best way to store my photos?

The first step is to decide on the best backup option for your business. Do you keep printed copies of each photo someplace? Do you want to keep multiple portable storage devices (i.e. memory cards, hard drives, USB drives, etc.) around? Do you want to put them up in the cloud and remove all hard storage from your location? For a lot of photographers, we've found the answer is a mixture of these options.

Printed Photos: Honestly, I don't know of any photographers that store printed photos. I just threw this option in to be thorough. Printed photos fade and can start to fall apart with time. If you need an example of this, just look at the photograph of your grandparents. There is a reason, after all, that photo restoration exists.

Physical Storage Devices: Many photographers subscribe to the theory that physical storage is the best way to go. Often photographers are afraid of losing data in the cloud. There is also an issue of privacy to be addressed, and, due to a lack of understanding, they choose the "safe route." This is a common and sometimes disastrous misunderstanding.

  • First, all storage devices are able to fail and have a finite life span. This is true of all digital methods of storage (including cloud storage but we'll address that in the next section). The longer the life-span of the device the more expensive it generally is. Spinning hard drives are amongst the worst as they have a short life-span expectation as well as moveable parts. Of course "life-span" is an expected number that doesn't account for errors, malfunction, or other complications.
  • Next is the issue of disaster recovery. To truly beat out disasters, you'll want to have a minimum of 3 copies of each drive. Keep one for easy access in your location and a second that you could get within a few hours at another location nearby. The third should be in a remote location for ultimate safety. Why should you keep all of these backups? Fires, Hurricanes, Tornados, Earthquakes, Burglary, and more threaten a poor backup plan.

Cloud Storage: The largest disadvantage to cloud storage is the lack of access to any files that are not synced locally if you lose the internet. Of course in these modern times, cellular service, home wi-fi, and the ease of access to public wi-fi mitigate this negative when it becomes an issue. I honestly can't think of any other disadvantages that I feel are real worries. Some don't like the idea of another company holding their files for a few reasons. Some worry about catastrophic events that would cause the internet to be inaccessible. Honestly, there are true and valid points to those thoughts - I just don't prescribe to them being a make-or-break to this decision. They are worth noting, however.

On the positive side, using Google Workspace as your cloud storage has many advantages. A few of those are:

  • Automatic backup of files across multiple data centers worldwide.
  • Google automatically replaces hardware failures so you won't have to worry about accidentally losing files.
  • Robust sharing controls that allow you to securely or insecurely share files (depending on your needs).
  • Multiple ways to view your files - a couple of which are photo-friendly.
Store photos on hard drive
So susceptible to failures...

Why Choose Google Workspace Over the Competition

With Google Workspace Business Standard, each account gets 2TB of Google Drive's online storage as part of the deal. $12/mo. for 2TB of storage is a pretty amazing deal but not much more than the competition. Dropbox offers a comparable plan at $9.99/mo. as of this writing. While Dropbox Paper is a neat note-taking application, Dropbox's value is mostly just storage. As mentioned in the first section, Google Workspace is SO much more than just online storage. With Google Workspace you can always upgrade to get unlimited storage as well. Google offers enterprise plans that can help you achieve this and pricing starts at just $20/user account.

So, for $20 a month, your entire photo library could be in the cloud - secure, backed up, and ready for sharing if necessary. If you're really shooting photographs on a regular basis, an external hard drive a month will cost you far more than that for a single local backup.

Of course, I'd be remiss if I didn't bring up Google Drive's sharing capabilities and how much better they are than most of the competition as well. I'll get more into the depth of sharing in the next section. It's important to note, however, that the ability to control many aspects of sharing in Drive is more fine-grained and more complete than any competitor I've used.

Using Google Workspace to Share Photos with a Client

This is one of the most awesome features of Google Workspace. The ability to share files with anyone in various ways is one of Drive's biggest strengths. You can share a file with anyone that wants to see it or you can lock it down so they can only access the file with a Google Account that you specify. There are multiple options in between as well.

If you're reading this far, you're probably a photographer. The photographers that we've worked with in the past have taught us a lot about their workflow. Imagine having a client that you wanted to send photos to. Their photos need to be private but they may want to select people to share them with. Using Google's sharing built into Google Drive, you can allow them to add other viewers by email address. If it's less important for security, you can create a sharable link that keeps the link random and unpublicized but allows anyone that has the link instant access to the photos.

Google Drive's advantages over PASS, Pixieset, and others

As a photographer, you may wonder why it would be worthwhile to choose a non-photo specific option over the more mainstream photo options such as PASS, Pixieset, SmugMug, etc. While my argument is built around the extra features of Google Drive versus these other options, I'm going to ignore that fact here.

While Google Drive offers unlimited storage, the other options don't - even if they say they do. Why is that? The ones that offer unlimited storage often have restrictions on what you can do with that storage. Here are some examples of the competition:

  • Pixieset charges $40/mo. for 1000 GB (vs. 1 Google Account at $12/mo. for unlimited storage).
  • PASS charges $25/mo. for unlimited storage. You will lose your galleries after 10 years and you are unable to store RAW photos on PASS.
  • SmugMug is in the same boat as PASS.

Drive's biggest drawback for photographers

Google drive's biggest drawback for a photographer is the lack of a polished external interface - and that can be a deal-breaker for some photographers. While recognizing that drawback, I want to be upfront about an opinion I have on the competition as well. I don't believe it's in any business's best interest to use a third-party solution that, not only adds their branding to the solution but also redirects a web visitor from your business to a sub-site of their business. Yes, you may be getting customers and business - but so are they.

Bonus: Features you never knew you needed!

Google workspace: a professional photographer's dream - google g suite services

Online Office Suite: Google Workspace is incredibly feature-packed. At Wapiti, we are heavy users of Google Drive for documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and other files. We use Google's office suite (appropriately named Docs, Sheets, and Slides) rather than Microsoft's Office 365 most of the time. We love real-time collaboration and the ability to share files with anyone in only a couple of clicks. Mostly, we live on the cloud with everything we do. We use all of the features mentioned in this article to run our business.

Company Email: If you're familiar with Gmail, you'll love having your organization's email run through Google. This feature comes with your Google Workspace membership as well and is another of our favorite features. Each user at your organization gets an "account." Each account can have many email addresses and the Gmail interface can help you keep it all separated and organized. It's a very powerful email system yet is simple and easy to use and organize. It does lack some of the corporate power features of Microsoft's Office 365 offering but we've found that many of those features aren't used. It speaks volumes at the size of some of the companies that do use it.