What Event Photo Storage Really Costs
TIME&SPACE · Business of Events
Storage looks cheap per gigabyte and expensive per year, because the bill grows with every event and nothing ever leaves. Here is how to size it before it surprises you.
What Event Photo Storage Really Costs
In short: The per gigabyte price is not the problem. The problem is that event photography is additive: every event adds, nothing ever leaves, and the bill compounds while the value of the oldest files approaches zero.
Storage feels like a solved problem right up until the third year, when you notice a monthly line item that has quietly tripled and nobody can say what is in it.
Do the arithmetic once
A rough shape for a single event, and the numbers vary a lot by camera and how much you cull:
- Raw files from a full day, two photographers: often 60 to 150 GB
- Edited JPEGs delivered: a small fraction of that
- Web sized and thumbnail versions: smaller again, but they multiply per file
The delivered set is rarely the problem. The raws are. They are ten to twenty times the size of what anyone will ever look at again, and they are what people keep out of a general anxiety about deleting.
Run twenty events a year at the low end and you are adding well over a terabyte annually, forever, with no natural expiry.
The three costs people forget
Egress. Some providers charge to get data out. It is cheap until a gallery goes well and a thousand guests download in a weekend.
Redundancy. One copy is not a backup. A serious setup is two or three copies, and the bill multiplies accordingly.
Your time. The unpriced cost. Hours spent hunting for a file from an event two years ago is a real expense that never appears on any invoice.
The decision nobody makes
Ask a plain question about any set of files: what is the realistic probability anyone opens these again?
For delivered galleries within the first year, high. For raws from a corporate event in 2023, close to zero, and the client has had their files for two years.
Almost nobody has a deletion policy, so everything gets kept at full fidelity forever. It is not caution, it is the absence of a decision.
A policy that works
Delivered files: keep for the gallery lifetime, then archive. On TIME&SPACE a gallery runs a year from the event, which is a reasonable shape for your own archive too.
Raws: keep the selects, not everything. If you delivered four hundred frames from three thousand, the two thousand six hundred you rejected are unlikely to be revisited. Keeping the rejects at full size is the single largest avoidable line on most photographers' storage bills.
Cold storage: anything older than a year that you genuinely cannot delete belongs in an archive tier, which is dramatically cheaper and slower to retrieve. Slow is fine for files nobody is asking for.
Delete something, on a schedule. Once a year, with a rule you decided in advance.
Where this touches compliance
There is a second reason not to keep everything indefinitely, and it is not financial.
Photographs of identifiable people are personal data, and holding them with no end date is difficult to justify. A retention policy is both a cost control and the answer to a question a guest is entitled to ask. The reasoning on the guest-facing side is in how long event photos should stay online.
The short version
Price the whole thing, not the per gigabyte rate: redundancy, egress and your own time hunting for files. Then make the decision almost nobody makes, which is what gets deleted and when. Culling rejected raws and moving anything over a year old to cold storage handles most of it.
Founder, TIME&SPACE