You don’t want to run out of space in the middle of a shoot. It’s hard to come to an exact number, but we do know that it’s better to have too much than too little.īear this in mind when you’re buying external hard drives for photography. And you need to consider the camera resolution. The exact amount of digital storage you need is an equation between how much you shoot and which file type you like to use. An external hard drive gives you more storage capacity and durability. But SD cards are small, fragile, and easy to lose. You can take several SD cards when you’re shooting. That’s not a lot of shots if you’re shooting on location. A 16GB SD card will be full after just 200 photos. If you’re using a high-resolution camera, RAW files can surpass 80MB per shot. But that means RAW files are larger than JPEGs.

And they carry more information because they’re not compressed.

They allow for more creative freedom in post-production. Many photographers prefer to shoot in RAW file format. And this can be higher if you’re using a professional camera. The file size of a JPEG image is usually between 10 and 20MB.

But we also need to consider the size of a photo file. If you’re taking hundreds of photographs each week, you’ll need a lot of storage. The amount of storage you need depends on how many photos you take.

The best external hard drives for mac