Cloud Storage for Photographers — Back Up RAW Files, Sync Lightroom Catalogs, and Deliver to Clients

March 10, 2026 · 4 min read

Senior Engineer

You come home from a wedding shoot with 2,000 RAW files totaling 80 GB. They need to be backed up tonight, the best shots need to be edited and delivered to the client by Friday, and the archive needs to be kept for years. Here's how to automate all of that.

Photography is one of the most storage-intensive creative professions. RAW files from modern cameras range from 25–100 MB each. A single event can generate hundreds of gigabytes. Most photographers juggle local drives, NAS, and multiple cloud accounts — with no unified management tool. RcloneView changes that.

Manage & Sync All Clouds in One Place

RcloneView is a cross-platform GUI for rclone. Compare folders, transfer or sync files, and automate multi-cloud workflows with a clean, visual interface.

One-click jobs: Copy · Sync · Compare
Schedulers & history for reliable automation
Works with Google Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox, S3, WebDAV, SFTP and more

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Get Started Free →

Free core features. Plus automations available.

The Photography Storage Problem

Storage lifecycle

Phase	Data	Size	Duration
Ingest	Camera cards → Local SSD	50–200 GB/shoot	Hours
Edit	Lightroom/Capture One + RAW	Same	Days–weeks
Deliver	JPEGs to client	2–10 GB	After editing
Archive	RAW + edits + finals	50–200 GB	Years

What can go wrong

Drive failure — A single hard drive crash can destroy an entire wedding.
No off-site backup — Fire, theft, or flood takes out local copies.
Client delivery — Manual upload to Google Drive or Dropbox after every job.
Archive sprawl — Old shoots scattered across multiple drives with no organization.

RcloneView Photography Workflow

1) Connect your storage ecosystem

Add your local drives, NAS, and cloud accounts:

Typical setup:

Local NVMe SSD (active editing).
Synology NAS (central storage).
Backblaze B2 (off-site archive).
Google Drive (client delivery).

2) Immediate backup after ingest

After importing from camera cards, run a Copy job from your working drive to NAS:

3) Schedule nightly off-site backup

Back up your NAS to cloud storage every night:

NAS → Backblaze B2 (encrypted, nightly)

At $6/TB/month, B2 is affordable even for multi-TB archives.

4) Client delivery

When edits are done, copy the final JPEGs to the client's Google Drive or Dropbox folder:

5) Archive completed jobs

After client approval, move the entire project to archive storage:

Use Move to free up space on your working drive.
Archive goes to NAS + B2 (redundant copies).

Filter Rules for Photographers

Use rclone filters to manage different file types:

Back up only RAW files

--include "*.cr3"
--include "*.nef"
--include "*.arw"
--include "*.raf"
--include "*.dng"
--exclude "*"

Deliver only finals

--include "*/Finals/**"
--include "*/Delivery/**"
--exclude "*"

Skip previews and cache

--exclude "Lightroom Catalog Previews.lrdata/**"
--exclude ".cache/**"
--exclude "Thumbs.db"

Verify Your Backups

Verify that your NAS and cloud archive match:

For irreplaceable photos, verification isn't optional.

Monitor Large Transfers

RAW file transfers are big. Monitor progress:

Recommended Storage Architecture

Storage	Purpose	Cost
Local NVMe (1–2 TB)	Active editing	One-time purchase
NAS (Synology 4-bay)	Central storage, local archive	One-time + drives
Backblaze B2	Off-site encrypted backup	$6/TB/month
Google Drive	Client delivery	$10/month (2 TB)