How much storage do photographers need?
Every storage plan you have ever been quoted is priced in gigabytes, and gigabytes are a unit nobody shoots in. You do not finish a wedding and think that was 22 GB. You think that was a long Saturday, 800 images, and the parents want prints.
So the honest answer to "how much storage do I need" starts by converting the number you were sold into the number you work in: shoots you can keep live at once.
Start with the size of one job
Take a typical eight-hour wedding, delivered as edited JPEGs. At full resolution and a quality setting most studios land on, each file runs 20–30 MB. Deliver 600–900 of them and you are somewhere around 15–25 GB once you count the originals you keep online alongside the edits.
Call it 20 GB per wedding. Your number will differ — that is the point of doing this with your own files rather than a chart — but it is close enough to plan with.
From there the arithmetic is quick. At 20 GB a job, 1 TB holds about fifty weddings — which sounds like plenty until you remember that number is not weddings you shoot, it is weddings still sitting online. A studio shooting twenty-five a year that never takes a gallery down reaches that ceiling in the second season, not the fiftieth.
| Job | Typical delivered size | Roughly, per 1 TB |
|---|---|---|
| Wedding, 8 hours | 15–25 GB | ~50 |
| Portrait session | under 2 GB | ~500 |
| School or sports day | 8–15 GB | ~80 |
| Commercial half-day | 5–10 GB | ~120 |
Those are illustrative, not measurements of your work — export settings move them more than anything else does.
Portrait and family work changes the shape completely. A 45-minute session delivering 40 images is under 2 GB. You could hold two hundred of them in the space of eight weddings. Volume work — school sports, dance recitals, race days — inverts it again: thousands of frames, smaller each, and a delivery window measured in weeks rather than years.
The useful exercise is ten minutes long. Open your last five delivered jobs, note the folder size of each, and take the average. That single number, multiplied by how many jobs you keep online simultaneously, is your actual storage requirement. Everything else is estimating someone else's business.
The number that actually bites is delivery, not storage
Here is the part most photographers discover after they have already chosen a plan.
Storage is what your images cost to sit there. Delivery — bandwidth, egress, transfer, whatever your host calls it — is what they cost every time somebody opens the gallery. Those are different meters, and for a working studio the second one moves faster than the first.
A wedding gallery is not viewed once. It is viewed by the couple, then both sets of parents, then the bridal party, then the friend who was not invited but heard about the dress. Each of them scrolls the whole thing, and some of them download it. One well-forwarded wedding gallery can move several gigabytes of delivery on its own — more than the gallery occupies in storage.
This is why studios who size their plan purely on storage get surprised. The images fit comfortably. The viewing is what runs over. If you shoot work that gets shared widely — weddings, large events, anything with a guest list — weight your estimate toward delivery and leave storage headroom you may not strictly need.
Three decisions that change the answer more than your camera does
1. What you keep online versus what you keep. These are not the same library. Archived masters belong on drives and in cold storage, where capacity is cheap and nobody needs instant access. Online storage is a delivery surface: it should hold what clients might plausibly open this month. Studios that treat their gallery host as an archive pay delivery-grade prices for files nobody will ever request.
2. Whether you deliver RAW. Most studios do not, and should not by default. A RAW file is three to five times the size of the JPEG you export from it, it is not what the client asked for, and it hands over a working negative. If you deliver RAW as a paid add-on for commercial clients, size for it deliberately rather than discovering it.
3. How long galleries stay live. This is the single biggest lever, and it is entirely yours to set. A studio with a 90-day window and a studio that leaves every gallery up forever can shoot identical volumes and need storage that differs by an order of magnitude — because one of them is carrying five years of accumulated work and the other is carrying one quarter. If your storage keeps creeping upward without your shoot count changing, expiry is almost certainly the reason. We wrote a whole piece on choosing that window deliberately.
What "unlimited" is actually selling you
Unlimited storage is real in the sense that the host will not stop you, and unreliable in the sense that it is priced on the assumption that most customers will not use it. The constraint simply moves somewhere less visible: delivery caps, upload size limits, throttling on large downloads, or a fair-use clause that becomes interesting precisely when your business grows.
None of that makes unlimited plans a trap. It makes them a plan whose limits you have not been told, which is harder to reason about than a plan with a number on it. If you can see the meter, you can size against it. If you cannot, you find the edge by hitting it, usually on a Friday.
A sizing method you can run today
- Measure one job. Average the delivered size of your last five shoots.
- Count what stays live. How many jobs are open to clients at any moment? Be honest — include the ones you never got around to taking down.
- Multiply. That is your storage floor. Add 50% so growth does not become an emergency mid-season.
- Estimate delivery separately. Take the galleries most likely to get forwarded and assume each is viewed in full five to ten times. That is your bandwidth, and it is usually the number that governs.
- Set an expiry policy on purpose. Then re-run step 2 in six months and see whether it held.
The photographers who never think about storage are not the ones who bought the biggest plan. They are the ones who know their per-job number and made expiry a decision instead of an accident.
And whatever you land on, keep the delivery copy separate in your head from the copy that protects you. A gallery host is where clients collect their images; it is not a backup. The 3-2-1 rule covers that side, and the two jobs should never be doing each other's work.
Tobren Deliver states storage and delivery as separate, published numbers rather than a fair-use clause, so you can size against your own shoot count. More articles.