Wedding storage calculator: RAW files, backups and galleries
How much space does a season of weddings take? Put in your own numbers: frames per wedding, the size of one RAW file, how many weddings a year. You get the RAW total with backups, the drives to buy, and what the client galleries need while they're live.
To find your RAW size, look at a few files from a recent wedding and take a typical one. Compressed and lossless-compressed RAWs from the same camera can differ by half. Galleries count each delivered photo twice while live, once in the project and once in the gallery, which is how CullTone stores them.
Worked examples
If the calculator isn't running in your browser, these are the same sums for three common set-ups, at 3,000 frames per wedding, 30 weddings a year and two copies of every file.
| RAW file size | One wedding | A year, both copies | 4 TB drives a year |
|---|---|---|---|
| 25 MB (24 MP, compressed) | 75 GB | 4.5 TB | 2 |
| 50 MB (24 MP, uncompressed) | 150 GB | 9 TB | 3 |
| 60 MB (45 MP, lossless compressed) | 180 GB | 10.8 TB | 3 |
The RAW sizes in brackets are typical examples, not promises; check your own files. Drives are rounded up, because half a drive is still a drive to buy.
What the numbers leave out
Four things the sum can't see. Catalog and preview files from your editor, which can run to many gigabytes for a large wedding. Video, if you shoot any. The extra frames from a second shooter, which can double a wedding. And time: a drive bought this year has to be readable in five, so plan to copy old archives onto new drives before the old ones fail.
One number moves the total more than any drive purchase. Once a gallery is approved, the RAWs of the frames you archived are rarely needed again, and at many weddings that is a large share of the card. Keeping only the RAWs you delivered from is a choice to make in your contract, not on the night you run out of space.
Client galleries against the plans
Your RAW files stay on your own drives with CullTone and don't count against a plan. What counts is the finished JPEGs, the previews, and each live gallery's copy of its photos.
| Plan | Storage | Price a month |
|---|---|---|
| Free trial | 2 GB | $0 |
| Solo | 25 GB | $9 |
| Pro | 100 GB | $19 |
| Team | 500 GB | $49 |
| Studio | 1 TB | $89 |
With four galleries live at once and 600 photos of 10 MB each, the galleries alone need about 48 GB in your busiest month, plus the finished photos you keep in your projects.
Planning storage for client galleries walks through the whole estimate.
Keep the RAWs at home, the gallery online
CullTone culls and edits on your Mac and puts only the finished photos and previews online.