How to Keep Your Digital Portfolio Secure and Private

Although it used to be that keeping your photography safe and private was as simple as safeguarding your negatives and being careful with your prints, the explosion of digital photography has changed things in a lot of ways. And there are plenty of advantages to this: it's easier than ever to share your photos or sell them to a global audience, and if your house goes up in flames, you know your backed up photos are still in the cloud. That said, there are a number of security pitfalls that may make you a bit nervous about putting your whole digital portfolio online, especially if you want to keep it private. Let's have a look at the best security practices:

Choose a Good Cloud Service

There are plenty of sites that allow you to upload your photos either to sell or to store, but there are many differences between each of these sites. Some things to keep in mind: how much different storage levels will cost you, how legitimate the site is and how user-friendly it is. With any cloud service though, remember that you're not guaranteed privacy or security; you're uploading to someone else's servers, and there are plenty of things that could go wrong. Of course, you could always use an external hard-drive instead, but if you do so, you'll want to make sure you keep it in a safe place where it can't be destroyed by flooding, fire or anything else that would have ruined your film photography as well.

Install a VPN

When you're uploading your photos to the cloud, you want to make sure you have a secure internet connection, and believe it or not, this isn't something that you naturally come by! Actually, it's incredibly easy for someone (even a child) to hack you whenever you connect to a public WiFi network, and this could give them access to your cloud portfolio as well as the photos stored on your computer. If you use a Virtual Private Network (VPN) though, everything your computer communicates with the site that you're accessing will be hidden so that only yourself and the sites you trust can see your passwords and other information. And remember: this is applicable for all your devices, so get a VPN that can be used on your tablet and/or smartphone as well as your computer!

Watermark Your Photos

If you really want to make sure that your photos stay yours online, one of the easiest things to do is to watermark them. It may not always be the most attractive solution, but this will prevent your images from being illegally downloaded and used in any legitimate publications. A lot of stock photography sites will watermark your photos for you when you upload to their site, but if the site you're using doesn't do this, you should be able to do this yourself in your current photo editing software or in external watermarking software.

Control Who Can See Your Photos

One of the key ways to keep your digital portfolio private is to tweak your privacy settings to control who is able to see your photos. Privacy settings will vary depending on which cloud service you use, but if you don't want your photos to be visible to the general public, you should be able to fix that. And if you can't, you should consider just using a different cloud service. You should also note what permissions you're granting to people who have links to your digital albums; some services will allow you to share albums as either “View Only” or “Edit”, which can be useful if you're working on a collaborative project but which can be gut-wrenching should someone accidentally delete all your photos thinking that you had the originals stored somewhere else!

What else do you do to keep your digital portfolio safe? Share your tips below!