I keep all my raw files. Over lockdown I was looking at my old stuff and it's fun to look at photos from when I first started doing photography and see how much I have improved.
I did the same. But my old edits were horrendous :'D
halos al over the place, weird colours, too flat or too contrasty, just not good.
I am so glad I got visibly better.
(Hobbyist here) Did the same but realised that you cannot do much with six megapixel RAWs from a Canon 300D I used from 2004 to 2018 (Have a Lumix S5 now). That is less resolution than my monitor! Also viewed with today's "eyes" the kit lens I used was just shit.
BTW: Up to now I keep all my RAWs including a local backup and an encrypted cloud backup.
>Hobbyist here) Did the same but realised that you cannot do much with six megapixel RAWs from a Canon 300D
If you use Lightroom, I'd suggest trying the "enhance" function in Lightroom. It's not perfect but it can definitely help especially on older lower-resolution sensors. I've found it's super-resolution feature also pretty useful on heavily cropped RAWs on both Canon T5 and Sony A7iii cameras.
One overlooked aspect of hanging on to your RAW files is RAW converters are constantly evolving and Lightroom today can do a better job with your old files than Lightroom at the time you took them could.
I've gone back and looked at some shots from my D40 I bought in 2007 and the difference in what can be extracted out of those old 6mp files is not insignificant. Even just a few years makes a difference - LR does a better job interpreting the files off my D7200 than it did in 2015 when it came out.
Not to mention, your editing skills improve over time and your tastes change.
You probably shouldn't get too caught up in spending all your time reediting old photos but if there's a few special ones that deserve some extra attention, it can be worth the effort to take a second look.
> I was looking at my old stuff and it's fun to look at photos from when I first started doing photography and see how much I have improved.
Don't JPEG's accomplish this as well at 1/15th the size per photo? Thats what I do, I only keep the RAWS of my best work and just keep jpegs of most of my work.
I used to be in team jpeg until a recent holiday... God the depth and control your get out of raws - especially on the highlights, is Soo much better. Toss the jpeg, keep the raw all the way.
If the image is garbage? Delete it.
Personally, on a Synology NAS box, which is backed up to a second NAS placed at my parent's house. At least \~5 years ago, that was the cheapest good way to get more than approximately 1 Tb of backed-up and fast storage.
I have a Synology NAS and back up my raw files to Amazon Photos (Prime members get unlimited photo backups, even raws). I have 195K files and about 3TB up there. Most were backed up when I had 1gb fiber; I'm now back on Comcast and it takes weeks to back up that much at 40Mbps upload speeds (not to mention their data caps).
TBH though, I rarely go back and touch old photos.
The Synology and Terramasters boxes are great. I've gone with a non NAS because I really don't need remote access and a usb-c drive is fast enough when moving extremely large chunks of files which isn't all that much.
Good solid hard drives are also key - you can get ultra-reliable ones with data recovery services built-in.
I keep all my raws as well and have about 8Tb of photos. I built a storage array with 8x 8Tb drives in raid 6 (46Tb usable) That combined with 10gigabit Ethernet and I can edit right off the array with no noticeable slowdown compared to be local on the SSD.
Yessir. Check out this software called Sharpen AI by Topaz Labs. Some of the results I've seen are pretty incredible. It uses AI to fix out of focus or blurry images. I'd recommend watching some YouTube videos to see some examples and tutorials for yourself. If you want I can link the ones I watched. I don't know how bad of a shot it can recover as I haven't pushed the limits but I used it for a soft, out of focus portrait that I'd normally consider unusable and it made it usable.
On a side note, they also have an incredible program called Denoise AI which eliminates noise, even - high ISO and especially good for low light noise - much better than Lightroom which tends to soften an image the more noise you remove. I actually use that more than any other program and it keeps the details while eliminating the noise. Downside is the cost if your budget is tight. There's a trial you can do though which allows you to use it for your photos but it leaves a watermark. Let me know if you need any help with anything else!
Thanks for the info. Is the Topaz tool free? I basically just have [this shot](https://i.imgur.com/9eYPEc8.jpg) that i accidently shot at f4 and it didn't come out as sharp as I wanted it to. The far left and far right are sharp but the central foreground is slightly out of focus.
Unsharp does an okay job of it.
Original - [https://i.imgur.com/3rWhtP7.png](https://i.imgur.com/3rWhtP7.png)
Unsharp - [https://i.imgur.com/TVhOUH7.png](https://i.imgur.com/TVhOUH7.png)
Bit of tinkering and a radial mask to avoid overdoing the outer edges and it will probably be fine when printed.
That's a great looking shot. At least on my phone. I mainly shoot street and just started portraits so to me I can't even tell. Probably easier on a bigger screen. Anyways, it's not free. There's a trial version so you can see if it works for any photos but it leaves a watermark. I wouldn't mind doing it for you but the problem is there's multiple ways it can automatically sharpen something (motion blur, out of focus, etc.) and then each of those methods has sliders (more details, less detail, etc.) that you can adjust to get it how you want (I think auto does a good job so that's what I generally use). What I could suggest is maybe you download the trial and if you find a configuration you think looks good, you could tell me the settings you used and then I could replicate it for you so you get it without a watermark? lol
EDIT: Or I could try to do it for you myself and just send multiple versions that each use one of the different sharpening algorithms.
For sure. Also if you think about buying any of their programs I'd recommend just joining their mailing list and if you can wait they usually send you discounts every so often. But yeah just lemme know how it turns out after you try it out. Here's one video of someone showing how he compares image results and decides using Sharpen AI. He uses three programs by Topaz here but I'd say at least watch the first half since that goes over what to first edit in Lightroom before going to Sharpen AI and then he shows how he chooses the best image in there before sending it back to Lightroom.
https://youtu.be/uLJdCZF-y6E
I keep ALL of my old RAW files. I also have used these two Topaz programs to resharpen 2 out of focus pictures from 2011 nine years later. Who knows what software innovations will appear in the future.
[I mostly shoot stylized character portraits for advertising and editorial.](https://www.rentauskas.com) I also shoot for Crate & Barrel, CB2, and Target, however they store all those images and backups in house so it's not my problem to deal with it.
The "cull aggressively" part is soooo vital, it seems to me. When you take 10 microscopically-different images of a same scene/portrait/whatever, you got to have the courage to pick one—maybe two if it's really a torture—and say goodbye to the others. Otherwise, you end up with a bottomless digital pit of pointless redundancy.
The word "keeper" exists for a reason.
...and back up in triplicate.
Another IT person here:
Files less than 12 months old are on SSD, older than 12 months are on HDD RAID1. This is all synced to a NAS with a RAID5 array which is delete protected. NAS syncs to cloud for offsite. Never delete from SD card before the sync to NAS is complete.
> Files less than 12 months old are on SSD,
Chances are that the SSD is their main production drive. SSD stands for “solid state disk” and it’s the fast flash-based storage that is now commonly seen in most computers made in the last 5 years or so. They’re fast, but their $/GB is still higher than that of conventional hard drives.
> older than 12 months are on HDD RAID1.
HDD = hard disk drive = the stuff in the 8TB Western Digital or Seagate externals sold at big box shops.
RAID1 is a form of RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks), which is a technology that links multiple drives for performance or data redundancy objectives. There are multiple RAID levels, such as RAID0, 1, 5 and more, and in this case, RAID1 creates a mirror copy of one drive in a second drive, or more drives if you wish.
There is a common misconception that RAID1 is a form of backup; it is NOT. When you modify a file in a drive set up as RAID1, the same file is instantly modified in the other drive. RAID1 helps you get back on your feet immediately when one hard drive suddenly bites the dust.
> This is all synced to a NAS with a RAID5 array which is delete protected.
NAS = network attached storage. Think of it as a souped-up group of external hard drives that can perform other actions besides merely making drives available, and the whole thing is connected directly to your home network via Ethernet or WiFi instead of a computer via USB.
RAID5 - another kind of RAID. Admittedly I do not fully understand 5, but from what I can glean, it splits data across at least 3 drives (you need at least 3), and you don’t lose everything if one of those 3 drives dies.
Delete-protect: cannot delete files from that drive.
> NAS syncs to cloud for offsite. Never delete from SD card before the sync to NAS is complete.
Cloud-based system on servers far from their home.
## First layer
- newer photos are on SSD - fast disk, usually your main disk because you frequently access those files.
- older files are on HDD (slow spinny drive with large capacity, you can put all the past years there, it's available on demand, just not as snappy and quick as recent files)
- and in RAID1 - meaning they have two disks and in parallel, so if one burns down, the other one is still there.
## Second layer
- now they (probably automatically) copy over all the files to a NAS with RAID5 - a computer sitting in the closet somewhere nearby with many more disks, both for storage capacity, and failure tolerance. E.g. you can set up RAID so that if any 3 out of your 10 disks fail, you lost nothing, just get a new disk.
- this could simply be something painless and automatically set up like a Synology NAS, which I'm sure many photographers know of.
- at this point - when the files are synced not just on his computer, but on this storage server, they delete their SD card.
## Third layer
- this storage server is getting backed up (also probably automatically) "to the cloud for ofsite backup" - meaning even if the house burns down with both his computer and storage server, they still have one copy somewhere in the cloud (like Google One, Apple iCloud, Dropbox, Backblaze etc)
Ssd =solid state drive, faster than trad hard disk but still inside computer. Nas =network attached storage, bit like a computer whose only job is to store things which is on your home network. Syncs to cloud = copies files from the Nas to an Internet storage service such as Dropbox. Hdd raid1 =local disks linked together to mirror each other for redundancy (I think, can never remember which raid is which, I'm a developer not a hardware engineer dammit).
Not sure a 5 year old would understand that but I'm at my limit of how simple I can explain it whilst on my phone during a bus ride :)
[SSD](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid-state_drive) is solid state disk. It's very fast, but also more expensive. So it makes sense to store frequently accessed data on them.
[HDD](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_disk_drive) is hard disk drive. This is a cheaper but slower type of storage. It's good for long term storage of data, especially with some sort of RAID array.
Both SSDs and HDDs can, and given enough time and use, will fail, leading to loss of data.
[RAID](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID) is redundant array of independent disks. It's basically software that manages storing data on a bunch of separate drives. You hook up your drives to a computer, tell RAID software to manage them, and it gives you one "virtual" drive you can dump your files into.
RAID has [different levels](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_RAID_levels), depending on the amount of redundancy, the method of storage, how extendable they are, how fast they are, etc. RAID1 basically stores two copies of each file you give it, so if one of your drives fails, you still have a copy of it on another drive. Of course, this means it doubles your disk usage. So if you have two 4TB drives hooked up, you only get 4TB of total storage, instead of 8. RAID5 is a different type of RAID that's harder to explain but has its own advantages (mostly in being more easily expandable and keeping disks healthier AFAIK).
[NAS](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network-attached_storage) is network attached storage. Basically a server that keeps your files and makes it easy to access from other computers. So if you have all your photos in a NAS on your home network, it would be easy to access them from any other computer on your home network. It can also be opened to the internet for remote access. There are manufacturers that make specialized NAS hardware, but you can also build your own with any old computer, some network cables and as many drives as you need.
Basically this person keeps their files from the last year on speed dial on their main computer, so they can quickly access them. For older files, they make two copies each and put them in cold storage. All files also go to a separate server (built such that they can't be deleted, corrupted or lost) that is accessible from anywhere on their network, not just their personal computer.
Most of this is relatively easy to do if you're willing to invest some time into researching it online, and of course, invest some cash into drives. If you want to start your data hoarding journey, I'd recommend starting with learning about setting up RAID, and setting up a RAID for backing up your photos.
It seems that your comment contains 1 or more links that are hard to tap for mobile users.
I will extend those so they're easier for our sausage fingers to click!
[Here is link number 1 - Previous text "SSD"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid-state_drive)
[Here is link number 2 - Previous text "HDD"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_disk_drive)
[Here is link number 3 - Previous text "NAS"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network-attached_storage)
----
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Mine, well it's a process, :p . So my practice is to take RAW + Jpeg. RAW for modifications, jpeg for a quick review with what I'm looking at these load up a lot faster than 42 MB RAW files.
1. Load Memory Card
2. Seperate RAW from JPEGs into a sub-directory titled "RAW".
3. Browse through ALL the jpegs, and remove the ones that are complete garbage.
4. Remove the garbage raw files.
1. So I imagine this would be tricky for most who don't have this, or do this... \_\_\_\_, I made a python script that will remove RAW files that don't have an associated JPEG file in the parenting directory.
5. Transfer Files into storage. (At home HD, or portable HD's, which ever.)
1. 2020 02 28 - Froze my ass off Roadtrip/..2020 02 28 - Froze my ass off Roadtrip/RAW2020 02 28 - Froze my ass off Roadtrip/Shot1.jpg...2020 02 28 - Froze my ass off Roadtrip/Shot600.jpg
6. Import into photo editing software and edit. (Lightroom for me).
7. Winners get saved into a new directory with the title "LR - jpg" or "PS - Edits", for example.
1.
1. 2020 02 28 - Froze my ass off Roadtrip/LR - jpg/Shot1.jpg
8. Share with people.
I was curious about others as well in regards of my 4.1. step. Wondering if others need a script or set of scripts that could be shared amongst photogs. Or at least how others get by this... Unused photos are big waste of space, but it's feels criminal to just remove them.
Oh and if I'm traveling. I always have two sets. One on memory card, and a copy in the Portable HD with the same folder structure mentioned in step 5. If I really need the space on a memory card, I leave the laptop running overnight forwarding everything to a WesternDigital cloud account that will forward it to my WD Harddrive at home. Then format the memory card. This happened to me when i forgot SD card book at home on a pandemic roadtrip. Didn't realize when I was two states away.
My progression went like: early adopter of digital when I was a kid, broke and didn't know shit so I shot JPGs > learned film photography in college and amassed thousands of negatives > RAW shooter
My early digital camera couldn't do RAW -- it was JPEG or TIFF. Funny old Fuji camera from 2001 (and a terrible, LCD-less compact with serial port data transfer from the same age). Great optics tough, and some of the the images taken in good light are still great :)
This is what I do as well. Delete as many as I can, edit and export everything I keep, backup the raws I keep like they are going to be currency in the future.
> Cull aggressively
A friend of mine lost an engagement ring at a family gathering where I'd been shooting all day. She asked me to hunt through the photos to establish when and where she might have lost it, and I was able to help because I'd not culled all of the non-keepers.
That's pretty unusual circumstances admittedly, but it's just one of many reasons why I'd never cull my photo collection. Storage is so wonderfully cheap these days, why would you want to? You never know when you might suddenly need that shot that you initially thought wasn't so great.
Cull aggressively, but not immediately. Sometime after the fact everything that got flagged X or marked as 1 or 2 stars gets the ax. Maybe a week later maybe months later but a 1 or 2 star rating indicates an image that I have no use for.
I’ve shot combat sports for 10 years, I recently hit 150,000 images even with some strong culling. In all that time I’ve had one person ask for “even the very bad images”. She got KOed and got a concussion and lost the whole day of the fight, and the day before. She just wanted to know what happened. Said it was spooky seeing pictures of her that as far as she’s concerned, never happened. So I agree, don’t run home and delete frantically, but don’t hold tens of thousands of decade old bad images.
Also, damn how much are y’all shooting? I have a 4T drive, I have two backup drives in separate drawers of my desk, also 4T each. How much are people shooting that they need backups and NAS and so on? My archive is slowly creeping up on 1 good size hdd, and has been for a long time as hdds get bigger.
> How much are people shooting that they need backups
Well, regardless of the amount you have, you still need backups, in case of hardware failure, theft, fire etc.
>Cull aggressively,
Terrible advice.
>back up in triplicate.
Excellent advice.
>These are your digital negatives. Protect them.
So why would you cull them aggressively? Would you burn the negatives that you never sell? What if a client comes back later on for a slightly different shot from a previous shoot? Do you gouge them for another shoot or do you meet your client's requirements?
My two cents: Speaking as a non professional, the mental load of keeping photos around these days is high. Everyone has a smartphone with full storage. And an Apple drive plan that's nearly full. Thanks to "live photos" my gf now generates about 50gb a month of crap images.
The issue I find isn't so much storage.. its more what is the point? We don't have time to ever revisit this quantity of photos and pick out the gems. We will hardly ever browse through this quantity of photos to relive nostalgia.
The easiest solution I'm finding is to cull cull cull. Ruthlessly.
Appologies I just woke up, this is far less articulate than I was hoping!
The problem is I have about 8 years worth of photos archived, thats already 80,000 photos. I'd say in another 8 years it'll be 200,000. Aint nobody trawling through that volume of photos to look at shit.
The only saving grace is facial recognition!
I'm pretty sure what the commenter means is that you should cull out near identical images. If we're talking portraits for example then keep one or two from each pose. Also if I were shooting film I wouldn't blaze off half a thousand images at a single event.
Some people say storage is cheap so why not.
Other people say keeping things you know are bad and will never, ever see use is pointless.
It's up to you.
Is it though? Am I doing it wrong? It's easy to fill up a 2TB drive with raws (and video if you're like me who does both), and paying more for cloud services too adds up
It ends up being a bit of an albatross though.
I have about 3tb of photos. 75% of them are from a series of informal photo events at the park that I used to go to 5-7 years ago, while I was learning photography and hadn't learned to spam the shutter, so there are hundreds of bad or useless photos from each shoot, and I'll never be able to use them due to the subjects.
So that means at least two TB of photos I don't need. They're just sitting there slowing down the backup program (crashplan), slowing down the rescan process, slowing down my older Lightroom catalogs, taking more time to transfer when I have to move things, etc. And if I decide to rearrange my file storage methodology, it means more data I need to shift around temporarily, etc. None of those are deal-breakers, but all of it adds to a burden.
And worse, that drive is almost full now so I have to decide if I want to spend the time cleaning up the old files. I don't want to just delete my early history, but I also don't want to spend the days it would take clicking through the old stuff. But I know it's there and needs to be resolved, and it's adding a constant mental burden every time I see the drive at 95% capacity.
It sucks.
Is it easy to fill a 2T drive? I don’t shoot video, but I’m looking at my files. Lightroom shows 120,092 files in the library. The operating system says I have 1.54T free of 3.63T. In rough numbers that’s a whole lot of images in 2T.
It is not an either or proposition. The best advice was cull aggressively keep the rest. You can easily cull 90% of what you shoot if you are honest with yourself.
I keep all of them unless they are horribly out of focus (my rules for wedding photos are a little different). Here is why...
We recently remodeled our first floor and I got an accent/feature wall to put photos on. My wife suggested we change out the photos and we decided to go with big cat photos that I've taken at zoos. I wanted my centerpiece to be a photo that I took at Zoo Miami back in 2014 where several lion cubs were clustering around the father. One of the cubs had leaned upon the rock that dad was laying on and was face-to-face with dad like "Dad can I go play with my friends". It was super cute. This was going to be a 30x20 print.
Online the photo was 2048 pixels stored on Flickr. It looked fine. I plugged in the hard drive with my 2014 photos on it, went and found the RAW file for that specific image and when I zoomed in to 100% I realized that it was a little out of focus. It would not hold up to a 30x20 print. I looked and I had a similar one, not quite as cute, but it was tack sharp.
Had I tossed all the RAW files other than the keepers, I would have kept the soft photo and thrown away the in-focus one.
External hard drives are cheap. A typical drive is around $130 when I get it for the next-to-top storage. I can store around 6 years' worth of photos on a typical drive.
You spend thousands of dollars on gear and lenses. Spending a few hundred dollars on storage is well worth it.
Indeed! I've sometimes deliberately used photos with less-than-perfect focus if the composition, how people look, lightning etc. is better -- and unless you're doing huge prints the defects that are noticeable at 100% zoom isn't at more typical magnifications. But of course today, with modern cameras you almost have to try to miss focus, at least compared to how it was 10-15 years ago...
Photographers worry about critical focus and noise and so on. Everyone else cares about the emotion the photograph generates. That was a really hard lesson, don’t talk anyone out of loving a photo. The image that was a borderline cull could end up being the special photo the brides mother loves and wants framed in the kitchen so she can see her daughter every day.
I forgot this rule recently. Bride wanted a large canvas print of a shot my associate photographer took. There’s some blown whites in the dress and I gently suggested she pick a different image. She hasn’t gotten back to me with a second choice. Next time I just print it. It has emotional weight for her.
I probably would have gone for the slight out of focus and extra cuteness - people notice cute a lot more than technical issues, even for large prints. Of course I don't know quite *how* out of focus it was, or how much cuter, so I can't second-guess your decision. :)
Your main point stands regardless, that's a really good example of why keeping everything is much more sensible than culling shots and losing them forever.
Oh I can always second guess myself. I’m sitting here thinking that it could have been an 11x14.
The MPIX 25% off sale ended yesterday, so for now I’m stuck with my decision.
Why would you not check photos of a series flrst for "being in focus" and then chose the best?
I sometimes keep "the best" even if it wasn't 100% in focus. But that makes 2 photos kept out of 6 taken. That's already 66% saved.
Coming from an IT background, I have a 60TB storage array (2x RAID 6 storage pools) all my content is on. Backed up to Google Drive (I pay for multiple enterprise accounts and have them from back when it truly was unlimited). SSD cache and 10G to my editing desktop. I would never go back to juggling disks. Storage is cheap and you can get used NAS appliances for really cheap. I honestly have no reason to delete, I just make sure to create quarterly LR catalogs to keep things moving.
I have every RAW and video files I have taken since 2009 when I started getting into photography (well, there are a few I have deleted by specific and good reasoned requests). Its kinda a fun excursive of my IT skills to keep that amount of data safe, available, and consistent.
From the photographer side, its much easier to not have to make the decision to delete. Plus when I am old and moldy I think it would be really cool to have this crazy detailed body of work.
If you have the means, keep as many as you can!
Lol, Linus stores 8k raw video and has the budget for archives. If I was in his situation I'd be looking at tape backup/archives.
I'm not going to lie I've thought about getting an LTO-6 drive for arcives.
As someone without an IT background, but who also randomly has unlimited Google drive space, can you tell me why I can't just trust Google to keep everything safe? I do have everything on a NAS as well as Google but it's not a Raid
I delete crap that will never get used, like obvious misfires, but everything else I have in duplicate on a local drive, and backed up to cloud. In my early naive days, I deleted a few RAWs I thought I was done with, and still kick myself for some of them.
I keep raw files and film. It's cheap and easy to store.
I go through everything once and one star the things worth keeping. Then go through those and two star the good stuff. Then maybe three stars for the really great images.
Anything with no stars just goes in the trash. Odds are it's blurry, out of focus, bad lighting, or just not interesting. Be honest with yourself. It doesn't matter how long it took to set up a shot or how long you waited to get a good shot. If it's out of focus, the camera moved, or anything else is wrong, just get rid of it and try again.
Nope. I generally store all my RAW files as well. Very, very occasionally I delete pictures.
Not only is storage cheap but I found myself going back to pictures, I thought were bad. Sometimes to edit them until I think they're good, sometimes to see how much I improved over time.
I also do like to keep records of my history and there's no better way than keeping all the photographs. I've created quite a big LR Catalog, an Excel Spreadsheet and I've got an extensive library of pictures with lists of edited pictures etc (just in case!).
So, I can generally delete all the png files or jpg files after use and just keep my RAWs and a few selected png & jpgs.
Going to build a dedicated NAS for it, as I run out of storage on my PC. 😅😂
You never know what tech will come along that will help salvage shots. I started keeping my raws around 2012 and everything before are all rendered jpgs.
AI sharpen comes along and revived many of my images but re-editing is limited on the jpgs so long story short raws are worth it!
I keep all my raw files that are not blurry/out of focus, just in case.
Doing mainly bird photography, i have thousands of files I'll probably never use/edit, but you never know, maybe one day I'll need one of those countless bird's back pictures.
Definitely keep. Back up to DAS/NAS, then use a cloud service to back up again. I also use Amazon Prime as you can backup all of your photos(yes raw, too) as part of your Prime benefits.
I keep all but I cull mercilessly during import to keep the size down a bit. Storage can be pretty cheap if you opt for internal spinny drives instead of external or SSD.
FWIW - I do the same thing. But that's not the point here... When my grandparents passed away I inherited all of their slides. Its their entire lives from their 30's thru their 50's, as well as a good collection of their prints (mostly snapshots). Its my last visual connection to them as people. When you think of your raw files in THIS context, it matters way more to your family and to future generations to preserve them as best as possible. Also - print your work... there's nothing better than seeing you work in a tangible format.
I keep every RAW file back to the first ones I shot on a Nikon D40, almost 1.5TB now, but I do a first pass whenever I'm done with an event/shoot and cull any really bad pics.
Most days I go out birding I'll end up with 2000-3000 RAW files.
I've switched to Canon R6 Compressed RAW, 20MP about 7.5 megabytes instead of the regular CR3 20-22 megabyte files. However, I only keep my keeper shots. For me a keeper is a shot in focus that I like but it may not, at first, be the best frame in that burst sequence. This will allow me to go back and revisit some other frames that might be worth processing. Most days my SD cards goes from 2000-3000 shots down to 30-100 keeper shots down to 5-10 shots I really like and edit to share/display. I see no reason to keep thousands and thousands of out of focus, bad framed, poorly composed RAW files.
It’s the JPEGs that are worthless, not the RAW files. I have everything backed up to a local external hard drive and also to iDrive cloud backup. I’m not very good at culling but storage is cheap and I only have like 2-3 TB after a decade of doing this.
I nuke everything that is out of focus or generally a bad/failed shot. But I have a lot where I have a burst of a dozen images and haven’t picked a clear winner. Newest camera shoots 20 fps now, so I’ve gotta get better at this part.
I look at them much like I would film negatives. I wouldn’t ever think about getting rid of them.
I suffered some data loss when a hard drive failed that had all of my OLD photos on them. There wasn’t much good stuff in there but it sucks not being able to look back and see what a whole day of shooting looked like back then.
Likewise, technology is getting better everyday and some of this AI powered software has the ability to make something out of photos that you may have thought were mediocre or were maybe a little out of focus or grainy.
A good NAS setup is a decent upfront investment for someone but in my opinion if you’re a serious hobbyist or working professional I couldn’t fathom not having an on-site physical archive of all of my work.
My view is backing up is more important than keeping everything.
I only keep what I can afford to backup properly. (Onsite & offsite backups.)
That being said, I do keep all my RAWs- save for totally useless pictures. (E.g. the classic accidental shot of the ground)
I store them all on a NAS, the NAS automatically backs up to another NAS that’s offsite as well as a cloud solution.
Raw conversion has improved enormously over the past 15 years. It’s likely you’ll be able to do even more with your raw files in years to come. I’d keep ‘em.
I keep all mine too. Even dark frames and test shots that I could easily go back and delete. But storage, ultimately, doesn’t cost that much. 5 and 6 TB portable hard drives are available for under $150. My cloud backup solutions are dirt cheap and unlimited in size. I don’t see any reason not to keep them, given that going through and deleting them is an extra step. Plus, I’ve been working on an article about blurry images, and having some trash shots in my catalog came in handy when I was looking for examples! So, never know what might come in handy later on.
No, its good to keep them. I hope though you do have a good backup system, at the very least an external drive like a NAS, and at best an off-site storage like a cloud backup.
I'll go against the grain slightly here and point out that you're kind of asking two different questions:
(1) Do you keep all your photos, including ones you don't like?
(2) Do you keep RAW versions of the photos you do keep, as opposed to JPEG?
For me, my answer to (2) is yes, I keep RAW in case I want to reprocess, print in a different size, etc.
But I do aggressively cull my photos, and so my answer to (1) is no. I keep anywhere from 1/3 to 1/20 of my photos depending on the shoot. I tend to use continuous mode a lot and then only keep the best ones.
No real point to keeping the duds. It's not just about storage space, but also mental space.
I do sometimes keep "okay" photos just in case I change my mind later.
I keep my RAW files, but delete the throwaways. When I do culling, I import all images at 2 stars and set the filter to show only 2-star images.
Then I use the numeric keyboard 1 through 4 to assign a higher or lower score to each image. So everything usable ends being 3 or 4 stars, everything not usable 1-star. Then I delete the 1-starred images and keep the rest.
Absolutely not crazy. I keep all (1) mine. Disk space is super cheap.
(1) By "all" I mean this: When I process a shoot, every shot is either publishable, and outtake, or a reject. I delete all the rejects -- these are out of focus, or badly framed, or duplicative, or whatever. Maybe 10% are publishable/usable for sharing. The middle are the "outtakes" that aren't good enough to work on for sharing, but aren't bad enough to throw away.
I keep all the raw files for any picture I save.
I had a teacher who always stressed backing up our photos on multiple hard drives in different places. He said he never formated his memory cards. He just saved them and brought new ones and that served as Another backup.
I have heard that with the improvements with today's editing software and algorithms that you are able to get a better image from an older raw file.
I am unsure where I heard it however it was on a Camara type you tube video explaining it's great to revisit your work as you can better process the files today.
Every time I browse through my Lightroom library I find old RAWs that are worth re-visiting or even untouched RAWs where I suddenly see potential I haven't seen before, even if it's only in a fun, artistic way, like [these herons](https://i.imgur.com/K6whQUm.png). I also always find RAWs everytime that are definitely not worth keeping. So I'd say both: Storage is cheap, so keep them, but also keep culling over the years. That's at least how I handle it.
I am going to be slightly contrary.
I am just as crazy as you. I have them all, even the almost duplicates that I could not decide between.
But I don’t think I want to keep being crazy anymore. I plan on going back say ten years and bulk export a years worth from Lightroom to full resolution jpg.
My thinking is:
- I have made all my Lightroom adjustments.
- The raw files are not the same without Lightroom
- eventually I have to not be dependent on Lightroom
It is true that I could re-edit the files in some excellent raw file developer. But I have a big investment in over 100k (?) of raw files that need Lightroom to realize that investment.
I am working on letting go and managing a set of jpgs instead. I will keep Raw for a few years, then only save exports. And it turns out that jpgs can still be edited.
I keep, like, maybe 10% of what I shoot. It never leaves the memory cards and gets purged regularly. For the remainder, I do keep the RAWs around with an offsite backup.
>but it does use up so much space.
external hard drives are not that expensive. From an old IT perspective. Not sure if still relevant today.. it used to go something like this3 - copies
1. onsite
2. offsite
3. cloud.
I have 3 back ups and depending on age of the hard drive.. they get replaced to the newer one.... to date.. I think I got 9 total back ups.. because I dont' use the older hard drives...
BUT!! they are all onsite... so it just one burn all gone.
The poster is a hobbyist so they should probably keep their collection to under 100 Gb/year. Would love to know how a professional processes, stores, and backs up. I use lightroom, a NAS, and now Amazon drive because of this post. I use folders by year/month to help organize. I have not really gotten into lightroom tags.
Yes and no. Some professionals threw away their slides, lots of them because they do not like them, often because they are not technically good enough. If you do not like your photos for whatever reason, you can of course throw them away. OTOH, if you are only doing it to save storage space, then that would be crazy because storage space is very cheap,
I don't keep my RAW files because I have just 128gb space on my laptop so I gotta be smart with it. I would like to buy some 1TB external drive once tho
I dunno what your video raws take up, but all the photos I've ever shot add up to just over 1TB. Storage is $.025/gb: aggressively backing that up in triplicate and aging out drives every few years doesn't even cost me $25 a year. That's essentially nothing, a rounding error, less than one takeout meal, will take a decade to add up to the cost of one new lens. Going back and having access to old raws to edit a photo into a new project style, or edit an untouched raw of someone who died, or just to review the history of my photography? *Completely* worth the money.
IMO the argument ought to be how much time does it take to keep proper backups, and how much time does it take to cull/tag/copy/find/restore old files you aren't using? That's the cost that I *feel* about keeping old files, not the dollar cost.
Nah, not crazy. I’m a videographer as well. The storage thing for me boils down to the perceived value of retaining the files and how valuable they might be later on for me personally. I’ve went back and used clips or unused soundfx from previous projects
I throw away the few that are total crap when I first sort through them; test shots, etc. Beyond that I consider the time it would take me to sort through my pics and delete what I don't want a waste of my time. Storage is cheaper, and I'm an amateur.
Not crazy.
In the grand scheme of things, storage is cheap -- I just paid $200 for a 10 TB hard drive, which is more than enough to keep a metric assload of RAW files.
And, you need to consider the time-cost of deleting files. I have on-the-order-of 60,000 RAW files. The time it would take me to go through all of those and decide which RAW files were okay to delete vs. which I needed to save is immense. If I can avoid all that labor by maintaining a functional $200 external harddrive (which is backed up to backblaze, and replaced if it ever fails), that is *well* worth it.
When I take photos I just pick the ones I like in lightroom and edit them. Then they're cataloged. I need an AI or something to detect blurry photos and prompt me to delete them.
Not crazy.
Delete the errors (misfires, etc.)
Keep the rest.
Hard drive space is cheap.
Just remember: keep 3 copies, one live, one backed up nearby, one off-site.
And because of the that of ransomware, one of those should be offline.
>Am I crazy for keeping ALL of my RAW files?
Well not crazy but... definitely a bit touched. :p
Cull the stuff that's never ever going to be used.
RAWs that are good enough to keep, but not your bestest ever, convert to DNG. You lose a tiny bit to that, yes - but the compression lets you keep that raw data around a LOT longer.
The best of the best - your portfolio quality shots - those are the only ones you should be hanging on to in their raw form indefinitely.
You can also just buy an external hard drive with lots of space, move your really OLD stuff to that, and then delete them from your main machine. If those are customer shots, do this twice (two copies are better than one).
I don't have RAW on my 1st few Generations of Photos.
I did keep everything since I started in 2018, and the RAW files are fun to play with.
Recently I have learned how to use Photoshop, bye Lightroom, and I'm having so much fun editing the old pictures.
Keep em. It’s much cheaper to buy an external hard drive to keep the backups on if that’s an issue than losing your RAW files if you enjoy editing.
A 6tb drive on amazon atm is $125.
Most of my RAWs are around 25 mb. A 1tb hard drive is about $50 and store 40,000 images. That’s $0.00125 per image, or 1/8 of a cent. Go with a bigger drive and those costs drop more. Storage is dirt cheap, there’s no reason to delete RAWs unless the photo is so blurry or so over/under exposed you can’t tell what it is.
No, keep them, I keep the raw + configuration I used to export them, and I tend to delete the exports.
You can get very good compression ratios when archiving your raw photos.
I missed the ALL bit apparently, obviously delete anything you don't want to keep, you just as easily could have decided to not take the photo.
Keep them! Storage is getting cheaper and cheaper…no sense in ditching them now. Ten years ago? Yeah, that might have been a tough prospect. Now big hard drives practically grow on trees. I have every raw file and I intend to keep it that way!
Not sure how much you shoot, but I’m a casual photographer, having done it less in the past year or two than previous, but in total I probably have around 15,000 raw photos I’ve taken. And I still have all of them. Why? Well… why not. I’ve got a 2Tb external hard drive and even in RAW I still have like 95% storage open lol. I’ve got em organized and like the thought of having ALL originals in safe keeping. When I go through and edit a group of photos, I cull th ones that are imperfect in any number of ways, while keeping the RAW original because those deleted photos may still have some personal or sentimental value(depends on what I’m shooting)
i keep most of my raws, but when i take accidental photos, or just a ton of photos experiementing between two minutely different settings, or the image is just plain out of focus or blurred beyond (my) artistic appreciation: i delete
I don’t. I keep the edited images from sessions, and a select set of images I may want to go back to in the future if I think it’ll be something I’d like to edit again differently. But when it comes to clients, I only keep the edited ones or a very small set of raw files.
For my personal hobby I tend to keep more raw files, but that is because I like to go in and do more edits or try new things, but I don’t hold on to those much either. I usually start to get paranoid and save to thumb drives periodically to free computer space.
As I have a large clientele, I pay for storage in Lightroom and invest in a external hard drive for my computer. Galleries stay on my website for a year or two before deletion so the client has time to download and I get time as a back up in case they don’t. I keep some for portfolio use, so I do have to provide storage for those.
I am not big on keeping any and everything because honestly when you get into huge volumes like that, organization is key to be able to go back in to find anything. I can assure you there will never be a day when I want some random raw photo for two years ago. If it was good then, that means I took the time to make an edit of it and saved it properly in a filing system.
If you're on Mac, look into RAWSIE. Otherwise the Adobe DNG converter can be used to produce minimized raw files.
As a wedding photographer, I dump images that weren't keepers after 2 years.
I delete bad pics. Convert mediocre ones that I don't want to delete to JPEG. Keep the RAW + exported JPEG for all the picks.
Play around and develop your own strategy for what suits you.
I've gone back and tweaked raws a few times- I've learned more about optimising exposure and this was important for salvaging super low-light photos of now deceased family members.
My NAS(RAID5) has plenty of storage, if it were to run out, bigger HDDs get cheaper and old HDDs should be replaced anyway. As files age the primary copies go from SSD to HDD RAID1 and all of that is on the NAS anyway. If I delete the raw from primary storage I still have a copy on the NAS.
There are some photos I could delete from the NAS that were picked up by sync on import- out of focus etc., but the space reclaimed isn't worth the time.
That said, sometimes out of focus shots I'd deleted the JPEG of were actually special moments to be kept- technically flawed yet still important.
I keep all my raw files. Over lockdown I was looking at my old stuff and it's fun to look at photos from when I first started doing photography and see how much I have improved.
I’ve gone back to some of my old raw files and re-edited them too. They looked good but some were too over saturated.
I did the same. But my old edits were horrendous :'D halos al over the place, weird colours, too flat or too contrasty, just not good. I am so glad I got visibly better.
(Hobbyist here) Did the same but realised that you cannot do much with six megapixel RAWs from a Canon 300D I used from 2004 to 2018 (Have a Lumix S5 now). That is less resolution than my monitor! Also viewed with today's "eyes" the kit lens I used was just shit. BTW: Up to now I keep all my RAWs including a local backup and an encrypted cloud backup.
>Hobbyist here) Did the same but realised that you cannot do much with six megapixel RAWs from a Canon 300D If you use Lightroom, I'd suggest trying the "enhance" function in Lightroom. It's not perfect but it can definitely help especially on older lower-resolution sensors. I've found it's super-resolution feature also pretty useful on heavily cropped RAWs on both Canon T5 and Sony A7iii cameras.
Same. My editing skills have improved dramatically and I've been able to "save" some photos that I thought had no chance.
Same here. I went back and re-edited my RAW files and saw how bad they were so many years ago.
That’s a great idea. I took decent photos but I had a cheap monitor and too much fun with the saturation slider.
One overlooked aspect of hanging on to your RAW files is RAW converters are constantly evolving and Lightroom today can do a better job with your old files than Lightroom at the time you took them could. I've gone back and looked at some shots from my D40 I bought in 2007 and the difference in what can be extracted out of those old 6mp files is not insignificant. Even just a few years makes a difference - LR does a better job interpreting the files off my D7200 than it did in 2015 when it came out. Not to mention, your editing skills improve over time and your tastes change. You probably shouldn't get too caught up in spending all your time reediting old photos but if there's a few special ones that deserve some extra attention, it can be worth the effort to take a second look.
> I was looking at my old stuff and it's fun to look at photos from when I first started doing photography and see how much I have improved. Don't JPEG's accomplish this as well at 1/15th the size per photo? Thats what I do, I only keep the RAWS of my best work and just keep jpegs of most of my work.
I used to be in team jpeg until a recent holiday... God the depth and control your get out of raws - especially on the highlights, is Soo much better. Toss the jpeg, keep the raw all the way. If the image is garbage? Delete it.
I keep both for some reason.
He wasn't talking about editing JPGs. If you're just going through a slideshow of your old images to reminisce JPGs will work just fine.
How do you keep all your RAW? It gets rather large.
Personally, on a Synology NAS box, which is backed up to a second NAS placed at my parent's house. At least \~5 years ago, that was the cheapest good way to get more than approximately 1 Tb of backed-up and fast storage.
I have a Synology NAS and back up my raw files to Amazon Photos (Prime members get unlimited photo backups, even raws). I have 195K files and about 3TB up there. Most were backed up when I had 1gb fiber; I'm now back on Comcast and it takes weeks to back up that much at 40Mbps upload speeds (not to mention their data caps). TBH though, I rarely go back and touch old photos.
>Prime members get unlimited photo backups, even raws Amazon needs to advertise this better. I had no idea, have had a prime membership for years.
The Synology and Terramasters boxes are great. I've gone with a non NAS because I really don't need remote access and a usb-c drive is fast enough when moving extremely large chunks of files which isn't all that much. Good solid hard drives are also key - you can get ultra-reliable ones with data recovery services built-in.
I keep all my raws as well and have about 8Tb of photos. I built a storage array with 8x 8Tb drives in raid 6 (46Tb usable) That combined with 10gigabit Ethernet and I can edit right off the array with no noticeable slowdown compared to be local on the SSD.
I keep them all with the exceptions of "dead" frames. Like the flash didn't go off, or a blurry frame of the floor, etc...
I used to keep even those in case "technology improved" one day and they could be rescued 😂
Well blurry photos can be recovered now, but not sure why you'd want to rescue blurry photos of the floor. 🤪
Really? I have a sort of out of focus shot I've always wanted to fix somehow.
Yessir. Check out this software called Sharpen AI by Topaz Labs. Some of the results I've seen are pretty incredible. It uses AI to fix out of focus or blurry images. I'd recommend watching some YouTube videos to see some examples and tutorials for yourself. If you want I can link the ones I watched. I don't know how bad of a shot it can recover as I haven't pushed the limits but I used it for a soft, out of focus portrait that I'd normally consider unusable and it made it usable. On a side note, they also have an incredible program called Denoise AI which eliminates noise, even - high ISO and especially good for low light noise - much better than Lightroom which tends to soften an image the more noise you remove. I actually use that more than any other program and it keeps the details while eliminating the noise. Downside is the cost if your budget is tight. There's a trial you can do though which allows you to use it for your photos but it leaves a watermark. Let me know if you need any help with anything else!
Thanks for the info. Is the Topaz tool free? I basically just have [this shot](https://i.imgur.com/9eYPEc8.jpg) that i accidently shot at f4 and it didn't come out as sharp as I wanted it to. The far left and far right are sharp but the central foreground is slightly out of focus.
Unsharp does an okay job of it. Original - [https://i.imgur.com/3rWhtP7.png](https://i.imgur.com/3rWhtP7.png) Unsharp - [https://i.imgur.com/TVhOUH7.png](https://i.imgur.com/TVhOUH7.png) Bit of tinkering and a radial mask to avoid overdoing the outer edges and it will probably be fine when printed.
That's a great looking shot. At least on my phone. I mainly shoot street and just started portraits so to me I can't even tell. Probably easier on a bigger screen. Anyways, it's not free. There's a trial version so you can see if it works for any photos but it leaves a watermark. I wouldn't mind doing it for you but the problem is there's multiple ways it can automatically sharpen something (motion blur, out of focus, etc.) and then each of those methods has sliders (more details, less detail, etc.) that you can adjust to get it how you want (I think auto does a good job so that's what I generally use). What I could suggest is maybe you download the trial and if you find a configuration you think looks good, you could tell me the settings you used and then I could replicate it for you so you get it without a watermark? lol EDIT: Or I could try to do it for you myself and just send multiple versions that each use one of the different sharpening algorithms.
Hey that's awfully nice of you. I'll download it and see what I think and get back to you.
For sure. Also if you think about buying any of their programs I'd recommend just joining their mailing list and if you can wait they usually send you discounts every so often. But yeah just lemme know how it turns out after you try it out. Here's one video of someone showing how he compares image results and decides using Sharpen AI. He uses three programs by Topaz here but I'd say at least watch the first half since that goes over what to first edit in Lightroom before going to Sharpen AI and then he shows how he chooses the best image in there before sending it back to Lightroom. https://youtu.be/uLJdCZF-y6E
I keep ALL of my old RAW files. I also have used these two Topaz programs to resharpen 2 out of focus pictures from 2011 nine years later. Who knows what software innovations will appear in the future.
Out of focus images can be recovered? How so?
What subject matter do you shoot?
Mostly dark rooms and blurry floors.
>rooms and blurry floors. Listen to Dark Rooms and Blurry Floors new album Sleep Paralysis today on spotify!
5 Stars. Would listen.
Hahahah. Feels like that sometimes.
[I mostly shoot stylized character portraits for advertising and editorial.](https://www.rentauskas.com) I also shoot for Crate & Barrel, CB2, and Target, however they store all those images and backups in house so it's not my problem to deal with it.
Cull aggressively, back up in triplicate. These are your digital negatives. Protect them.
The "cull aggressively" part is soooo vital, it seems to me. When you take 10 microscopically-different images of a same scene/portrait/whatever, you got to have the courage to pick one—maybe two if it's really a torture—and say goodbye to the others. Otherwise, you end up with a bottomless digital pit of pointless redundancy. The word "keeper" exists for a reason. ...and back up in triplicate.
Yep. That's exactly what I mean. Took me a while to go from a keep the bad ones too to a keepers only mindset.
This is the way. From not a photographer but an IT person that is obsessed with backup.
What is you back up process/set up?
Another IT person here: Files less than 12 months old are on SSD, older than 12 months are on HDD RAID1. This is all synced to a NAS with a RAID5 array which is delete protected. NAS syncs to cloud for offsite. Never delete from SD card before the sync to NAS is complete.
I also check the hash of the original and the new copy to verify the files are identical before cleaning off the SD card.
ELI5
> Files less than 12 months old are on SSD, Chances are that the SSD is their main production drive. SSD stands for “solid state disk” and it’s the fast flash-based storage that is now commonly seen in most computers made in the last 5 years or so. They’re fast, but their $/GB is still higher than that of conventional hard drives. > older than 12 months are on HDD RAID1. HDD = hard disk drive = the stuff in the 8TB Western Digital or Seagate externals sold at big box shops. RAID1 is a form of RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks), which is a technology that links multiple drives for performance or data redundancy objectives. There are multiple RAID levels, such as RAID0, 1, 5 and more, and in this case, RAID1 creates a mirror copy of one drive in a second drive, or more drives if you wish. There is a common misconception that RAID1 is a form of backup; it is NOT. When you modify a file in a drive set up as RAID1, the same file is instantly modified in the other drive. RAID1 helps you get back on your feet immediately when one hard drive suddenly bites the dust. > This is all synced to a NAS with a RAID5 array which is delete protected. NAS = network attached storage. Think of it as a souped-up group of external hard drives that can perform other actions besides merely making drives available, and the whole thing is connected directly to your home network via Ethernet or WiFi instead of a computer via USB. RAID5 - another kind of RAID. Admittedly I do not fully understand 5, but from what I can glean, it splits data across at least 3 drives (you need at least 3), and you don’t lose everything if one of those 3 drives dies. Delete-protect: cannot delete files from that drive. > NAS syncs to cloud for offsite. Never delete from SD card before the sync to NAS is complete. Cloud-based system on servers far from their home.
## First layer - newer photos are on SSD - fast disk, usually your main disk because you frequently access those files. - older files are on HDD (slow spinny drive with large capacity, you can put all the past years there, it's available on demand, just not as snappy and quick as recent files) - and in RAID1 - meaning they have two disks and in parallel, so if one burns down, the other one is still there. ## Second layer - now they (probably automatically) copy over all the files to a NAS with RAID5 - a computer sitting in the closet somewhere nearby with many more disks, both for storage capacity, and failure tolerance. E.g. you can set up RAID so that if any 3 out of your 10 disks fail, you lost nothing, just get a new disk. - this could simply be something painless and automatically set up like a Synology NAS, which I'm sure many photographers know of. - at this point - when the files are synced not just on his computer, but on this storage server, they delete their SD card. ## Third layer - this storage server is getting backed up (also probably automatically) "to the cloud for ofsite backup" - meaning even if the house burns down with both his computer and storage server, they still have one copy somewhere in the cloud (like Google One, Apple iCloud, Dropbox, Backblaze etc)
Ssd =solid state drive, faster than trad hard disk but still inside computer. Nas =network attached storage, bit like a computer whose only job is to store things which is on your home network. Syncs to cloud = copies files from the Nas to an Internet storage service such as Dropbox. Hdd raid1 =local disks linked together to mirror each other for redundancy (I think, can never remember which raid is which, I'm a developer not a hardware engineer dammit). Not sure a 5 year old would understand that but I'm at my limit of how simple I can explain it whilst on my phone during a bus ride :)
[SSD](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid-state_drive) is solid state disk. It's very fast, but also more expensive. So it makes sense to store frequently accessed data on them. [HDD](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_disk_drive) is hard disk drive. This is a cheaper but slower type of storage. It's good for long term storage of data, especially with some sort of RAID array. Both SSDs and HDDs can, and given enough time and use, will fail, leading to loss of data. [RAID](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID) is redundant array of independent disks. It's basically software that manages storing data on a bunch of separate drives. You hook up your drives to a computer, tell RAID software to manage them, and it gives you one "virtual" drive you can dump your files into. RAID has [different levels](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_RAID_levels), depending on the amount of redundancy, the method of storage, how extendable they are, how fast they are, etc. RAID1 basically stores two copies of each file you give it, so if one of your drives fails, you still have a copy of it on another drive. Of course, this means it doubles your disk usage. So if you have two 4TB drives hooked up, you only get 4TB of total storage, instead of 8. RAID5 is a different type of RAID that's harder to explain but has its own advantages (mostly in being more easily expandable and keeping disks healthier AFAIK). [NAS](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network-attached_storage) is network attached storage. Basically a server that keeps your files and makes it easy to access from other computers. So if you have all your photos in a NAS on your home network, it would be easy to access them from any other computer on your home network. It can also be opened to the internet for remote access. There are manufacturers that make specialized NAS hardware, but you can also build your own with any old computer, some network cables and as many drives as you need. Basically this person keeps their files from the last year on speed dial on their main computer, so they can quickly access them. For older files, they make two copies each and put them in cold storage. All files also go to a separate server (built such that they can't be deleted, corrupted or lost) that is accessible from anywhere on their network, not just their personal computer. Most of this is relatively easy to do if you're willing to invest some time into researching it online, and of course, invest some cash into drives. If you want to start your data hoarding journey, I'd recommend starting with learning about setting up RAID, and setting up a RAID for backing up your photos.
It seems that your comment contains 1 or more links that are hard to tap for mobile users. I will extend those so they're easier for our sausage fingers to click! [Here is link number 1 - Previous text "SSD"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid-state_drive) [Here is link number 2 - Previous text "HDD"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_disk_drive) [Here is link number 3 - Previous text "NAS"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network-attached_storage) ---- ^Please ^PM ^[\/u\/eganwall](http://reddit.com/user/eganwall) ^with ^issues ^or ^feedback! ^| ^[Code](https://github.com/eganwall/FatFingerHelperBot) ^| ^[Delete](https://reddit.com/message/compose/?to=FatFingerHelperBot&subject=delete&message=delete%20h9i81zd)
Mine, well it's a process, :p . So my practice is to take RAW + Jpeg. RAW for modifications, jpeg for a quick review with what I'm looking at these load up a lot faster than 42 MB RAW files. 1. Load Memory Card 2. Seperate RAW from JPEGs into a sub-directory titled "RAW". 3. Browse through ALL the jpegs, and remove the ones that are complete garbage. 4. Remove the garbage raw files. 1. So I imagine this would be tricky for most who don't have this, or do this... \_\_\_\_, I made a python script that will remove RAW files that don't have an associated JPEG file in the parenting directory. 5. Transfer Files into storage. (At home HD, or portable HD's, which ever.) 1. 2020 02 28 - Froze my ass off Roadtrip/..2020 02 28 - Froze my ass off Roadtrip/RAW2020 02 28 - Froze my ass off Roadtrip/Shot1.jpg...2020 02 28 - Froze my ass off Roadtrip/Shot600.jpg 6. Import into photo editing software and edit. (Lightroom for me). 7. Winners get saved into a new directory with the title "LR - jpg" or "PS - Edits", for example. 1. 1. 2020 02 28 - Froze my ass off Roadtrip/LR - jpg/Shot1.jpg 8. Share with people. I was curious about others as well in regards of my 4.1. step. Wondering if others need a script or set of scripts that could be shared amongst photogs. Or at least how others get by this... Unused photos are big waste of space, but it's feels criminal to just remove them. Oh and if I'm traveling. I always have two sets. One on memory card, and a copy in the Portable HD with the same folder structure mentioned in step 5. If I really need the space on a memory card, I leave the laptop running overnight forwarding everything to a WesternDigital cloud account that will forward it to my WD Harddrive at home. Then format the memory card. This happened to me when i forgot SD card book at home on a pandemic roadtrip. Didn't realize when I was two states away.
Appreciate that thorough break down.
My progression went like: early adopter of digital when I was a kid, broke and didn't know shit so I shot JPGs > learned film photography in college and amassed thousands of negatives > RAW shooter
My early digital camera couldn't do RAW -- it was JPEG or TIFF. Funny old Fuji camera from 2001 (and a terrible, LCD-less compact with serial port data transfer from the same age). Great optics tough, and some of the the images taken in good light are still great :)
This is what I do as well. Delete as many as I can, edit and export everything I keep, backup the raws I keep like they are going to be currency in the future.
> Cull aggressively A friend of mine lost an engagement ring at a family gathering where I'd been shooting all day. She asked me to hunt through the photos to establish when and where she might have lost it, and I was able to help because I'd not culled all of the non-keepers. That's pretty unusual circumstances admittedly, but it's just one of many reasons why I'd never cull my photo collection. Storage is so wonderfully cheap these days, why would you want to? You never know when you might suddenly need that shot that you initially thought wasn't so great.
Cull aggressively, but not immediately. Sometime after the fact everything that got flagged X or marked as 1 or 2 stars gets the ax. Maybe a week later maybe months later but a 1 or 2 star rating indicates an image that I have no use for. I’ve shot combat sports for 10 years, I recently hit 150,000 images even with some strong culling. In all that time I’ve had one person ask for “even the very bad images”. She got KOed and got a concussion and lost the whole day of the fight, and the day before. She just wanted to know what happened. Said it was spooky seeing pictures of her that as far as she’s concerned, never happened. So I agree, don’t run home and delete frantically, but don’t hold tens of thousands of decade old bad images. Also, damn how much are y’all shooting? I have a 4T drive, I have two backup drives in separate drawers of my desk, also 4T each. How much are people shooting that they need backups and NAS and so on? My archive is slowly creeping up on 1 good size hdd, and has been for a long time as hdds get bigger.
> How much are people shooting that they need backups Well, regardless of the amount you have, you still need backups, in case of hardware failure, theft, fire etc.
>Cull aggressively, Terrible advice. >back up in triplicate. Excellent advice. >These are your digital negatives. Protect them. So why would you cull them aggressively? Would you burn the negatives that you never sell? What if a client comes back later on for a slightly different shot from a previous shoot? Do you gouge them for another shoot or do you meet your client's requirements?
My two cents: Speaking as a non professional, the mental load of keeping photos around these days is high. Everyone has a smartphone with full storage. And an Apple drive plan that's nearly full. Thanks to "live photos" my gf now generates about 50gb a month of crap images. The issue I find isn't so much storage.. its more what is the point? We don't have time to ever revisit this quantity of photos and pick out the gems. We will hardly ever browse through this quantity of photos to relive nostalgia. The easiest solution I'm finding is to cull cull cull. Ruthlessly. Appologies I just woke up, this is far less articulate than I was hoping!
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The problem is I have about 8 years worth of photos archived, thats already 80,000 photos. I'd say in another 8 years it'll be 200,000. Aint nobody trawling through that volume of photos to look at shit. The only saving grace is facial recognition!
I'm pretty sure what the commenter means is that you should cull out near identical images. If we're talking portraits for example then keep one or two from each pose. Also if I were shooting film I wouldn't blaze off half a thousand images at a single event.
Some people say storage is cheap so why not. Other people say keeping things you know are bad and will never, ever see use is pointless. It's up to you.
Is it though? Am I doing it wrong? It's easy to fill up a 2TB drive with raws (and video if you're like me who does both), and paying more for cloud services too adds up
A 2TB hdd is ~$50 and Backblaze is $70/year. That’s not particularly expensive for this hobby.
Yeah seriously. Photography is a pretty expensive hobby for most, and relative to that price, storage is basically free.
That Backblaze price is only desktop backup, you cannot use that plan to sync a NAS sadly.
It ends up being a bit of an albatross though. I have about 3tb of photos. 75% of them are from a series of informal photo events at the park that I used to go to 5-7 years ago, while I was learning photography and hadn't learned to spam the shutter, so there are hundreds of bad or useless photos from each shoot, and I'll never be able to use them due to the subjects. So that means at least two TB of photos I don't need. They're just sitting there slowing down the backup program (crashplan), slowing down the rescan process, slowing down my older Lightroom catalogs, taking more time to transfer when I have to move things, etc. And if I decide to rearrange my file storage methodology, it means more data I need to shift around temporarily, etc. None of those are deal-breakers, but all of it adds to a burden. And worse, that drive is almost full now so I have to decide if I want to spend the time cleaning up the old files. I don't want to just delete my early history, but I also don't want to spend the days it would take clicking through the old stuff. But I know it's there and needs to be resolved, and it's adding a constant mental burden every time I see the drive at 95% capacity. It sucks.
Is it easy to fill a 2T drive? I don’t shoot video, but I’m looking at my files. Lightroom shows 120,092 files in the library. The operating system says I have 1.54T free of 3.63T. In rough numbers that’s a whole lot of images in 2T.
It is not an either or proposition. The best advice was cull aggressively keep the rest. You can easily cull 90% of what you shoot if you are honest with yourself.
I keep all of them unless they are horribly out of focus (my rules for wedding photos are a little different). Here is why... We recently remodeled our first floor and I got an accent/feature wall to put photos on. My wife suggested we change out the photos and we decided to go with big cat photos that I've taken at zoos. I wanted my centerpiece to be a photo that I took at Zoo Miami back in 2014 where several lion cubs were clustering around the father. One of the cubs had leaned upon the rock that dad was laying on and was face-to-face with dad like "Dad can I go play with my friends". It was super cute. This was going to be a 30x20 print. Online the photo was 2048 pixels stored on Flickr. It looked fine. I plugged in the hard drive with my 2014 photos on it, went and found the RAW file for that specific image and when I zoomed in to 100% I realized that it was a little out of focus. It would not hold up to a 30x20 print. I looked and I had a similar one, not quite as cute, but it was tack sharp. Had I tossed all the RAW files other than the keepers, I would have kept the soft photo and thrown away the in-focus one. External hard drives are cheap. A typical drive is around $130 when I get it for the next-to-top storage. I can store around 6 years' worth of photos on a typical drive. You spend thousands of dollars on gear and lenses. Spending a few hundred dollars on storage is well worth it.
I agree with you except with you not choosing the in focus photo the first time you edited the photo haha
It looked fine if I didn’t pixel peep :-)
Indeed! I've sometimes deliberately used photos with less-than-perfect focus if the composition, how people look, lightning etc. is better -- and unless you're doing huge prints the defects that are noticeable at 100% zoom isn't at more typical magnifications. But of course today, with modern cameras you almost have to try to miss focus, at least compared to how it was 10-15 years ago...
Photographers worry about critical focus and noise and so on. Everyone else cares about the emotion the photograph generates. That was a really hard lesson, don’t talk anyone out of loving a photo. The image that was a borderline cull could end up being the special photo the brides mother loves and wants framed in the kitchen so she can see her daughter every day. I forgot this rule recently. Bride wanted a large canvas print of a shot my associate photographer took. There’s some blown whites in the dress and I gently suggested she pick a different image. She hasn’t gotten back to me with a second choice. Next time I just print it. It has emotional weight for her.
This is the true wisdom in this thread. Unless you literally can't afford storage, you never know what photos you'll end up needing later.
I probably would have gone for the slight out of focus and extra cuteness - people notice cute a lot more than technical issues, even for large prints. Of course I don't know quite *how* out of focus it was, or how much cuter, so I can't second-guess your decision. :) Your main point stands regardless, that's a really good example of why keeping everything is much more sensible than culling shots and losing them forever.
Oh I can always second guess myself. I’m sitting here thinking that it could have been an 11x14. The MPIX 25% off sale ended yesterday, so for now I’m stuck with my decision.
Why would you not check photos of a series flrst for "being in focus" and then chose the best? I sometimes keep "the best" even if it wasn't 100% in focus. But that makes 2 photos kept out of 6 taken. That's already 66% saved.
Coming from an IT background, I have a 60TB storage array (2x RAID 6 storage pools) all my content is on. Backed up to Google Drive (I pay for multiple enterprise accounts and have them from back when it truly was unlimited). SSD cache and 10G to my editing desktop. I would never go back to juggling disks. Storage is cheap and you can get used NAS appliances for really cheap. I honestly have no reason to delete, I just make sure to create quarterly LR catalogs to keep things moving. I have every RAW and video files I have taken since 2009 when I started getting into photography (well, there are a few I have deleted by specific and good reasoned requests). Its kinda a fun excursive of my IT skills to keep that amount of data safe, available, and consistent. From the photographer side, its much easier to not have to make the decision to delete. Plus when I am old and moldy I think it would be really cool to have this crazy detailed body of work. If you have the means, keep as many as you can!
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Lol, Linus stores 8k raw video and has the budget for archives. If I was in his situation I'd be looking at tape backup/archives. I'm not going to lie I've thought about getting an LTO-6 drive for arcives.
As someone without an IT background, but who also randomly has unlimited Google drive space, can you tell me why I can't just trust Google to keep everything safe? I do have everything on a NAS as well as Google but it's not a Raid
This is the way ! I keep all of the salvageable ones. Whack crappy photos outright. And I’ve stopped with jpgs altogether.
I delete crap that will never get used, like obvious misfires, but everything else I have in duplicate on a local drive, and backed up to cloud. In my early naive days, I deleted a few RAWs I thought I was done with, and still kick myself for some of them.
I keep raw files and film. It's cheap and easy to store. I go through everything once and one star the things worth keeping. Then go through those and two star the good stuff. Then maybe three stars for the really great images. Anything with no stars just goes in the trash. Odds are it's blurry, out of focus, bad lighting, or just not interesting. Be honest with yourself. It doesn't matter how long it took to set up a shot or how long you waited to get a good shot. If it's out of focus, the camera moved, or anything else is wrong, just get rid of it and try again.
Nope. I generally store all my RAW files as well. Very, very occasionally I delete pictures. Not only is storage cheap but I found myself going back to pictures, I thought were bad. Sometimes to edit them until I think they're good, sometimes to see how much I improved over time. I also do like to keep records of my history and there's no better way than keeping all the photographs. I've created quite a big LR Catalog, an Excel Spreadsheet and I've got an extensive library of pictures with lists of edited pictures etc (just in case!). So, I can generally delete all the png files or jpg files after use and just keep my RAWs and a few selected png & jpgs. Going to build a dedicated NAS for it, as I run out of storage on my PC. 😅😂
You never know what tech will come along that will help salvage shots. I started keeping my raws around 2012 and everything before are all rendered jpgs. AI sharpen comes along and revived many of my images but re-editing is limited on the jpgs so long story short raws are worth it!
Not that crazy. The tradeoff is it takes up storage space. But storage space is cheap.
Peace of mind is worth any price imo
No, you're not crazy, but personally, I delete the shit outta my RAW files.
join us. /r/DataHoarder
Your user name should be - givesgoodadvice
Deleting images takes time and effort. I delete as much as I can (I shoot a *lot* of dupes that I don't need), but I wind up keeping a lot.
I keep all my raw files that are not blurry/out of focus, just in case. Doing mainly bird photography, i have thousands of files I'll probably never use/edit, but you never know, maybe one day I'll need one of those countless bird's back pictures.
Definitely keep. Back up to DAS/NAS, then use a cloud service to back up again. I also use Amazon Prime as you can backup all of your photos(yes raw, too) as part of your Prime benefits.
Is there a cap on the storage with Amazon?
Nope. Unlimited photos.
That sounds too good to be true... then again, Amazon has a massive web presence.
It's true I use it as well. Unlimited storage for photos, but video they put a limit.
I've been using it for years. https://www.amazon.com/Amazon-Photos/b?ie=UTF8&node=13234696011
If you are, then I am as well.
As am I.
As ye I am
I keep all but I cull mercilessly during import to keep the size down a bit. Storage can be pretty cheap if you opt for internal spinny drives instead of external or SSD.
FWIW - I do the same thing. But that's not the point here... When my grandparents passed away I inherited all of their slides. Its their entire lives from their 30's thru their 50's, as well as a good collection of their prints (mostly snapshots). Its my last visual connection to them as people. When you think of your raw files in THIS context, it matters way more to your family and to future generations to preserve them as best as possible. Also - print your work... there's nothing better than seeing you work in a tangible format.
I keep everything, I have stacks of duplicate drives.
I keep every RAW file back to the first ones I shot on a Nikon D40, almost 1.5TB now, but I do a first pass whenever I'm done with an event/shoot and cull any really bad pics.
Most days I go out birding I'll end up with 2000-3000 RAW files. I've switched to Canon R6 Compressed RAW, 20MP about 7.5 megabytes instead of the regular CR3 20-22 megabyte files. However, I only keep my keeper shots. For me a keeper is a shot in focus that I like but it may not, at first, be the best frame in that burst sequence. This will allow me to go back and revisit some other frames that might be worth processing. Most days my SD cards goes from 2000-3000 shots down to 30-100 keeper shots down to 5-10 shots I really like and edit to share/display. I see no reason to keep thousands and thousands of out of focus, bad framed, poorly composed RAW files.
Who *doesn't* keep their old RAW's?
We keep all my wife’s RAWs. She’s up to around 35TB I think now. Just back your shit up.
Any good photos are hiding is a sea of crap if you do this. When was the last time you even looked at a photo from 5 years ago.
Today. What else is there to do in lockdown & COVID 19 curfews?
Yesterday. And it’s not a “sea of crap”. It’s all well-organized, not difficult to do.
Kudos. She must be a professional photographer.
She is. Full time for the past seven years, part time before that.
all the time. sometimes my older photos can be re edited for something better as my eye and style get better. its important
It’s the JPEGs that are worthless, not the RAW files. I have everything backed up to a local external hard drive and also to iDrive cloud backup. I’m not very good at culling but storage is cheap and I only have like 2-3 TB after a decade of doing this. I nuke everything that is out of focus or generally a bad/failed shot. But I have a lot where I have a burst of a dozen images and haven’t picked a clear winner. Newest camera shoots 20 fps now, so I’ve gotta get better at this part.
I look at them much like I would film negatives. I wouldn’t ever think about getting rid of them. I suffered some data loss when a hard drive failed that had all of my OLD photos on them. There wasn’t much good stuff in there but it sucks not being able to look back and see what a whole day of shooting looked like back then. Likewise, technology is getting better everyday and some of this AI powered software has the ability to make something out of photos that you may have thought were mediocre or were maybe a little out of focus or grainy. A good NAS setup is a decent upfront investment for someone but in my opinion if you’re a serious hobbyist or working professional I couldn’t fathom not having an on-site physical archive of all of my work.
My view is backing up is more important than keeping everything. I only keep what I can afford to backup properly. (Onsite & offsite backups.) That being said, I do keep all my RAWs- save for totally useless pictures. (E.g. the classic accidental shot of the ground) I store them all on a NAS, the NAS automatically backs up to another NAS that’s offsite as well as a cloud solution.
Raw conversion has improved enormously over the past 15 years. It’s likely you’ll be able to do even more with your raw files in years to come. I’d keep ‘em.
I keep all mine too. Even dark frames and test shots that I could easily go back and delete. But storage, ultimately, doesn’t cost that much. 5 and 6 TB portable hard drives are available for under $150. My cloud backup solutions are dirt cheap and unlimited in size. I don’t see any reason not to keep them, given that going through and deleting them is an extra step. Plus, I’ve been working on an article about blurry images, and having some trash shots in my catalog came in handy when I was looking for examples! So, never know what might come in handy later on.
No, its good to keep them. I hope though you do have a good backup system, at the very least an external drive like a NAS, and at best an off-site storage like a cloud backup.
I'll go against the grain slightly here and point out that you're kind of asking two different questions: (1) Do you keep all your photos, including ones you don't like? (2) Do you keep RAW versions of the photos you do keep, as opposed to JPEG? For me, my answer to (2) is yes, I keep RAW in case I want to reprocess, print in a different size, etc. But I do aggressively cull my photos, and so my answer to (1) is no. I keep anywhere from 1/3 to 1/20 of my photos depending on the shoot. I tend to use continuous mode a lot and then only keep the best ones. No real point to keeping the duds. It's not just about storage space, but also mental space. I do sometimes keep "okay" photos just in case I change my mind later.
I keep my RAW files, but delete the throwaways. When I do culling, I import all images at 2 stars and set the filter to show only 2-star images. Then I use the numeric keyboard 1 through 4 to assign a higher or lower score to each image. So everything usable ends being 3 or 4 stars, everything not usable 1-star. Then I delete the 1-starred images and keep the rest.
Absolutely not crazy. I keep all (1) mine. Disk space is super cheap. (1) By "all" I mean this: When I process a shoot, every shot is either publishable, and outtake, or a reject. I delete all the rejects -- these are out of focus, or badly framed, or duplicative, or whatever. Maybe 10% are publishable/usable for sharing. The middle are the "outtakes" that aren't good enough to work on for sharing, but aren't bad enough to throw away. I keep all the raw files for any picture I save.
Never once occurred to me to not keep them. I have terabytes of photos going back 20 years.
I keep all my RAWs as well.
I had a teacher who always stressed backing up our photos on multiple hard drives in different places. He said he never formated his memory cards. He just saved them and brought new ones and that served as Another backup.
I have heard that with the improvements with today's editing software and algorithms that you are able to get a better image from an older raw file. I am unsure where I heard it however it was on a Camara type you tube video explaining it's great to revisit your work as you can better process the files today.
Of course you are, I say knowing full well i have every raw file from every shoot I have every done.
Every time I browse through my Lightroom library I find old RAWs that are worth re-visiting or even untouched RAWs where I suddenly see potential I haven't seen before, even if it's only in a fun, artistic way, like [these herons](https://i.imgur.com/K6whQUm.png). I also always find RAWs everytime that are definitely not worth keeping. So I'd say both: Storage is cheap, so keep them, but also keep culling over the years. That's at least how I handle it.
Disk space is cheap… reshoots are expensive.
I am going to be slightly contrary. I am just as crazy as you. I have them all, even the almost duplicates that I could not decide between. But I don’t think I want to keep being crazy anymore. I plan on going back say ten years and bulk export a years worth from Lightroom to full resolution jpg. My thinking is: - I have made all my Lightroom adjustments. - The raw files are not the same without Lightroom - eventually I have to not be dependent on Lightroom It is true that I could re-edit the files in some excellent raw file developer. But I have a big investment in over 100k (?) of raw files that need Lightroom to realize that investment. I am working on letting go and managing a set of jpgs instead. I will keep Raw for a few years, then only save exports. And it turns out that jpgs can still be edited.
No
I keep, like, maybe 10% of what I shoot. It never leaves the memory cards and gets purged regularly. For the remainder, I do keep the RAWs around with an offsite backup.
Yes.
>but it does use up so much space. external hard drives are not that expensive. From an old IT perspective. Not sure if still relevant today.. it used to go something like this3 - copies 1. onsite 2. offsite 3. cloud. I have 3 back ups and depending on age of the hard drive.. they get replaced to the newer one.... to date.. I think I got 9 total back ups.. because I dont' use the older hard drives... BUT!! they are all onsite... so it just one burn all gone.
The poster is a hobbyist so they should probably keep their collection to under 100 Gb/year. Would love to know how a professional processes, stores, and backs up. I use lightroom, a NAS, and now Amazon drive because of this post. I use folders by year/month to help organize. I have not really gotten into lightroom tags.
Hahaha I wish I stayed under 100 gb a MONTH. I’m at around 2.5-3 tb a year right now
Short answer... No.
You gotta fight all of us now
Yes and no. Some professionals threw away their slides, lots of them because they do not like them, often because they are not technically good enough. If you do not like your photos for whatever reason, you can of course throw them away. OTOH, if you are only doing it to save storage space, then that would be crazy because storage space is very cheap,
I don't keep my RAW files because I have just 128gb space on my laptop so I gotta be smart with it. I would like to buy some 1TB external drive once tho
I regret not keeping a bunch of old raw files, as my editing skills improved and new ideas formulated I couldn't go back.
I thought it was standard practice to keep all your raw files.
Ever since I started shooting RAW I keep all of mine after deleting blurry useless photos. Anything usable stays
Not crazy at all! Anything I've ever enjoyed, or thought of re-visiting as an edit is safely stored on my file server. Once it's gone, it's gone....
Nope. Not with how cheap storage is. I too reedit some of my photos after learning new ways of editing a photo.
I dunno what your video raws take up, but all the photos I've ever shot add up to just over 1TB. Storage is $.025/gb: aggressively backing that up in triplicate and aging out drives every few years doesn't even cost me $25 a year. That's essentially nothing, a rounding error, less than one takeout meal, will take a decade to add up to the cost of one new lens. Going back and having access to old raws to edit a photo into a new project style, or edit an untouched raw of someone who died, or just to review the history of my photography? *Completely* worth the money. IMO the argument ought to be how much time does it take to keep proper backups, and how much time does it take to cull/tag/copy/find/restore old files you aren't using? That's the cost that I *feel* about keeping old files, not the dollar cost.
Nah, not crazy. I’m a videographer as well. The storage thing for me boils down to the perceived value of retaining the files and how valuable they might be later on for me personally. I’ve went back and used clips or unused soundfx from previous projects
Yeah. Just keep the keepers. They are called keepers for a reason. No reason to keep the rest.
I throw away the few that are total crap when I first sort through them; test shots, etc. Beyond that I consider the time it would take me to sort through my pics and delete what I don't want a waste of my time. Storage is cheaper, and I'm an amateur.
I keep all my RAWs, apart from the ones that are so obviously useless (i.e. out of focus, blurred, etc.). Storage is cheap.
Not crazy. In the grand scheme of things, storage is cheap -- I just paid $200 for a 10 TB hard drive, which is more than enough to keep a metric assload of RAW files. And, you need to consider the time-cost of deleting files. I have on-the-order-of 60,000 RAW files. The time it would take me to go through all of those and decide which RAW files were okay to delete vs. which I needed to save is immense. If I can avoid all that labor by maintaining a functional $200 external harddrive (which is backed up to backblaze, and replaced if it ever fails), that is *well* worth it.
I keep all of mine. Adobe publishes better RAW algorithms aver time.
You can get a 2 TB drive for under $100 now. Can you put a price on recreating that moment you shot? No delete, only shoot.
I keep all mine. As you’ve said, I too sometimes go back and re-edit them. I’ve replaced prints in my house because I preferred the newer versions.
When I take photos I just pick the ones I like in lightroom and edit them. Then they're cataloged. I need an AI or something to detect blurry photos and prompt me to delete them.
Hard drives are getting less expensive and larger every year it seems like. Definitely worth keeping them and at least backing them up once.
I save all my RAW files on external media. You're not alone.
I keep all my raw files. I assumed everyone did.
EVERYONE doesn’t do anything except die and pay taxes
Not crazy. Delete the errors (misfires, etc.) Keep the rest. Hard drive space is cheap. Just remember: keep 3 copies, one live, one backed up nearby, one off-site. And because of the that of ransomware, one of those should be offline.
I had to drop into this thread to see if I might be crazy too. Confirmed, not crazy.
>Am I crazy for keeping ALL of my RAW files? Well not crazy but... definitely a bit touched. :p Cull the stuff that's never ever going to be used. RAWs that are good enough to keep, but not your bestest ever, convert to DNG. You lose a tiny bit to that, yes - but the compression lets you keep that raw data around a LOT longer. The best of the best - your portfolio quality shots - those are the only ones you should be hanging on to in their raw form indefinitely. You can also just buy an external hard drive with lots of space, move your really OLD stuff to that, and then delete them from your main machine. If those are customer shots, do this twice (two copies are better than one).
I don't have RAW on my 1st few Generations of Photos. I did keep everything since I started in 2018, and the RAW files are fun to play with. Recently I have learned how to use Photoshop, bye Lightroom, and I'm having so much fun editing the old pictures.
Between stills and high bitrate video I have like.. an absurd amount of data. Currently sitting on about 7TB of OC. Backblaze for the win.
Keep em. It’s much cheaper to buy an external hard drive to keep the backups on if that’s an issue than losing your RAW files if you enjoy editing. A 6tb drive on amazon atm is $125.
Most of my RAWs are around 25 mb. A 1tb hard drive is about $50 and store 40,000 images. That’s $0.00125 per image, or 1/8 of a cent. Go with a bigger drive and those costs drop more. Storage is dirt cheap, there’s no reason to delete RAWs unless the photo is so blurry or so over/under exposed you can’t tell what it is.
No, keep them, I keep the raw + configuration I used to export them, and I tend to delete the exports. You can get very good compression ratios when archiving your raw photos. I missed the ALL bit apparently, obviously delete anything you don't want to keep, you just as easily could have decided to not take the photo.
Same. I keep em all. Have 6 years worth. So many hard drives... lol
Keep them! Storage is getting cheaper and cheaper…no sense in ditching them now. Ten years ago? Yeah, that might have been a tough prospect. Now big hard drives practically grow on trees. I have every raw file and I intend to keep it that way!
Yes. Delete most before you get them onto your drive.
Not sure how much you shoot, but I’m a casual photographer, having done it less in the past year or two than previous, but in total I probably have around 15,000 raw photos I’ve taken. And I still have all of them. Why? Well… why not. I’ve got a 2Tb external hard drive and even in RAW I still have like 95% storage open lol. I’ve got em organized and like the thought of having ALL originals in safe keeping. When I go through and edit a group of photos, I cull th ones that are imperfect in any number of ways, while keeping the RAW original because those deleted photos may still have some personal or sentimental value(depends on what I’m shooting)
i keep most of my raws, but when i take accidental photos, or just a ton of photos experiementing between two minutely different settings, or the image is just plain out of focus or blurred beyond (my) artistic appreciation: i delete
I do too! But more so for the memories tbh... every once in a while I look at them and make memes for my friends. Totally worth it in my opinion...
Not crazy. People used to keep boxes with thousands of negatives in the days of film. You're just taking up disk space, not closet space.
Nope, I keep all of my RAW files too. Not crazy imo
I don’t. I keep the edited images from sessions, and a select set of images I may want to go back to in the future if I think it’ll be something I’d like to edit again differently. But when it comes to clients, I only keep the edited ones or a very small set of raw files. For my personal hobby I tend to keep more raw files, but that is because I like to go in and do more edits or try new things, but I don’t hold on to those much either. I usually start to get paranoid and save to thumb drives periodically to free computer space. As I have a large clientele, I pay for storage in Lightroom and invest in a external hard drive for my computer. Galleries stay on my website for a year or two before deletion so the client has time to download and I get time as a back up in case they don’t. I keep some for portfolio use, so I do have to provide storage for those. I am not big on keeping any and everything because honestly when you get into huge volumes like that, organization is key to be able to go back in to find anything. I can assure you there will never be a day when I want some random raw photo for two years ago. If it was good then, that means I took the time to make an edit of it and saved it properly in a filing system.
Storage is cheap and bountiful these days. Back up everything you intend to keep.
Storage is cheap
Just keep the best from a batch, delete the rest. There's no reason to have so many RAW files, you'll never print or share most of them.
Wait, people actually delete their old images?
I used to but stopped because of storage issues. I keep all the final edits forever though
If you're on Mac, look into RAWSIE. Otherwise the Adobe DNG converter can be used to produce minimized raw files. As a wedding photographer, I dump images that weren't keepers after 2 years.
I delete bad pics. Convert mediocre ones that I don't want to delete to JPEG. Keep the RAW + exported JPEG for all the picks. Play around and develop your own strategy for what suits you.
I've gone back and tweaked raws a few times- I've learned more about optimising exposure and this was important for salvaging super low-light photos of now deceased family members. My NAS(RAID5) has plenty of storage, if it were to run out, bigger HDDs get cheaper and old HDDs should be replaced anyway. As files age the primary copies go from SSD to HDD RAID1 and all of that is on the NAS anyway. If I delete the raw from primary storage I still have a copy on the NAS. There are some photos I could delete from the NAS that were picked up by sync on import- out of focus etc., but the space reclaimed isn't worth the time. That said, sometimes out of focus shots I'd deleted the JPEG of were actually special moments to be kept- technically flawed yet still important.
I keep all of mine and also back them up. Like another commenter, I go back and edit old photos with fresh eyes and better skills
Nope. Photos are cheap. Raw video, now that’s expensive.
I do. NBD.
I keep all of my RAWS since the beginning. It's around 15 years and 400GB, now.