Do you remember waiting for a roll of film to be developed? I used to enjoy going to the photo lab and collecting those envelopes filled with photos. I’d sit down on a bench somewhere and pore through them excitedly. Sometimes, they’d be from rolls of film I’d been sitting on for a few years, so looking through them was a joyous exercise in reliving those memories. If I had the extra money, I might even pay for 7×5 prints or even a grainy 8×10 enlargement. We don’t experience any of that with digital photography, of course, but there is a close cousin: finding unedited RAW files on drive backups.

I’m not especially organised when it comes to my photo backups. I’ve even lost a bunch of photos from one particular holiday due to my lack of foresight. Admittedly, I’m also a bit burned out on the tech and the multiple passwords and the platforms and…well you get the idea. In short – my fault for not listening to the hard drive that was burping and farting to let me know it was living its final days. So, it’s always nice to discover a maverick folder full of photos files I’d forgotten about.

I use One Drive a lot for backups now. I usually save a DNG version to the cloud and save a web-ready version for this journal and for sharing (1000 px on the long side and 60% JPG quality, if you’re interested). You might also have noticed that my photos now have a neat black border with some EXIF information on the side and a URL for this place. It’s an unobtrustive way to watermark the photos, record some useful EXIF data, and make the photo pop a little more against the black border. It’s a slightly convoluted process to install and configure, but once set up, the Mogrify 2 plugin works well in Lightroom. I have a license somewhere, but it probaby went down with another bad hard drive incident.