How Much Storage Does a Year of Wedding Photography Actually Take?

Ask ten wedding photographers how much storage they buy per year and you’ll get ten shrugs and one spreadsheet. Here are the real numbers, so you can budget drives like you budget lenses.

The per-wedding math

A full wedding day runs 2,000-4,000 frames for a single shooter. On a modern 45 MP body, a lossless compressed RAW lands around 45 MB. That’s:

• 2,500 frames × 45 MB ≈ 112 GB straight off the cards
• Add selects exported as JPEG/TIFF, catalog previews and a delivery set: 130-150 GB per wedding, all-in
• Second shooter? Add 60-80% again.

Shooting a 24 MP body instead? Roughly half that. This is why “how much storage do I need” has no one answer — it’s a function of your camera, your frame count and your season. Our storage calculator does the math for your exact body and workload.

A season, in terabytes

Twenty weddings on a 45 MP camera is 2.5-3 TB of new data per year before backups. The 3-2-1 rule (three copies, two media types, one offsite) turns that into 8-9 TB of total capacity you need to own or rent. That sounds scary; it’s actually about two hard drives and a cloud plan.

What working photographers actually run

1. Cards: enough capacity to never delete during a job. Dual slots, mirrored.
2. Working SSD: current jobs live here until delivery. 2-4 TB NVMe.
3. Archive HDDs: cheap spinning disks, one pair, rotated. This is copy two.
4. Offsite/cloud: the copy that survives a burglary or a house fire.

The failure mode that kills businesses isn’t a dead drive — it’s a dead drive that was the only copy of an undelivered wedding. Copies are cheap. Reshoots are impossible.

Budget it like a cost, because it is one

Storage is part of your cost of doing business — if you’re not folding drive-replacement into your rates, you’re paying for it out of profit. Run your real numbers through the CODB calculator and price it in.