A wedding season, two shooters
Full-day weddings, 3,000 frames per camera, two 24 MP bodies recording RAW + JPEG, 25 weddings a year.
- Per shoot
- 230 GB
- Per year
- 5.8 TB
- Archive
- 5.8 TB
- Card · plan
- 256 GB · 10 TB
Pick the kind of shoot, your camera, RAW or JPEG and how many cameras are shooting. You'll get the storage per shoot and per year or season, the memory card each camera needs, and the cloud plan size that holds your archive — with the formula and assumptions below.
It sizes one frame from your camera's resolution and format, then multiplies by frames, cameras and shoots. Units are decimal, as card makers and cloud plans count them (1 GB = 1,000 MB, 1 TB = 1,000 GB).
RAW (MB) ≈ megapixels × 1.2 (lossless; 2 uncompressed, 0.6 compact)
JPEG (MB) ≈ megapixels × 0.4
Per shoot (GB) = frame size × frames per camera × cameras ÷ 1,000
Per season = per shoot × shoots; archive = per season × kept %
Card / plan = smallest common size ≥ need × 1.25
RAW + JPEG adds both files. Card sizes considered: 32 GB, 64 GB, 128 GB, 256 GB, 512 GB, 1 TB, 2 TB. Plan sizes considered: 100 GB, 200 GB, 1 TB, 2 TB, 5 TB, 10 TB, 20 TB — common sizes across storage services; we don't name providers or prices.
| Shoot type | Frames per camera | 24 MP RAW + JPEG |
|---|---|---|
| Full-day wedding | 3,000 | 115 GB |
| Half-day wedding or elopement | 1,000 | 38.4 GB |
| Corporate event or conference day | 1,200 | 46.1 GB |
| Party or social event (3–4 h) | 600 | 23 GB |
| Portrait or headshot session | 300 | 11.5 GB |
| Sports game or match | 1,500 | 57.6 GB |
| Concert or performance | 1,000 | 38.4 GB |
| School or team picture day | 2,000 | 76.8 GB |
Full-day weddings, 3,000 frames per camera, two 24 MP bodies recording RAW + JPEG, 25 weddings a year.
1,500 frames a game from one 24.2 MP Canon EOS R10 in JPEG, 40 games a season.
300 frames a session on a 102 MP Fujifilm GFX 100 II in lossless RAW, 80 sessions a year, keeping 30 % after the cull.
Backing up during the shoot changes the maths for the day: tethering your camera to your phone and backing up photos while you shoot gives you an off-site copy before you leave the venue. To see whether your connection can keep up, use the upload time calculator; for wedding workflows, see wedding photography tethering.
About 230 GB for a full day with two 24 MP cameras shooting 3,000 frames each in RAW + JPEG, or 28.8 GB for one camera in JPEG only. A season of 25 such weddings is about 5.8 TB before culling. Your own frame counts and camera make the biggest difference — change them above.
About 4,444 lossless RAW files or 3,333 RAW + JPEG pairs from a 24 MP camera, and about 2,370 RAW files from a 45 MP body. Cameras show their own remaining-shots estimate, which is usually conservative.
Not quite: the JPEG adds about a third to each RAW file (0.4 MB per megapixel on top of 1.2 MB for lossless RAW). It's worth it when you deliver JPEGs during the shoot and edit the RAW files later.
Add up a year of shoots after culling and leave about 25 % headroom, then plan for growth: archives only get bigger. Many photographers keep culled RAW files and delivered JPEGs, not every frame. The calculator suggests the smallest common plan size that fits your year; compare providers' plans of that size.
Drive and card makers count 1 GB as 1,000,000,000 bytes; Windows (and older macOS) count 1 GB as 1,073,741,824 bytes, so a 1 TB drive shows as about 931 GB. This calculator uses the makers' decimal units, like your camera and cloud plans do.
Keep at least two copies of everything until the client has their photos, one of them off-site — a cloud backup made during the shoot counts. After delivery, many photographers archive the culled RAW files and the delivered JPEGs and let the rejects go. Set “Kept after culling” to see what your archive really needs.
It's free, needs no account and runs entirely in your browser — nothing you enter is sent anywhere. The page address updates with your numbers, so you can bookmark or share a result.
CloudTether copies every frame from your camera to your phone as you shoot and sends it to Dropbox, Google Drive, your own server or a client gallery — so the card is never the only copy.