Do you keep your files?

guybrush

guybrush

Messages
358
Name
Rebecca
Edit My Images
Yes
I've just looked at my Lightroom stack, and I apparently have 13,567 (!) pictures, and that's not even including a few hundred from when SD cards have broken and I've lost shots from a day. But in total that's just shy of 130 gb worth of original JPEG, RAW & DNG files, so none of this is even my final processed shots.

.. but what to do with them all? The majority of them are set-up shots/tests/shots gone wrong etc. But for some reason I just can't bring myself to delete ANY of them. Given this is all from less than a years worth of shooting purely on a hobby basis, it's quite apparent that storing them and having ample back-ups is going to get quite expensive in a couple of years!

Do you store all your photos, or just keep the best?
 
with rallying, if i nail them (lol) i keep 1 per car per location for sale (yeah right, what bloody sales) purposes, delete most the rest unless they're special/different.

shoot around 1,500 an event, and do 30 odd events a year
 
I delete the ones that are quite clearly not going to be used (ie pure black/pure white). The rest I archive.
 
I only keep RAW files for pictures that I think worth printing, and/or selling (hopefully one day :D). Rest, converted to smaller size jpegs... some I keep them full size jpegs though..
 
I do a selection after every shoot and only keep the ones that are usable. When I shoot in difficult conditions I usually do several shots of the same subject but later I review them and only keep the best of every set.
 
My Lr catalogue is about 30,000 but Ive thousands not on it (due to having lost a catalogue file with no backup :(

I delete what will never be used.
 
I pretty much archive and backup everything.
 
Even after a recent 'purge' (which was more of a 'light prune'), I've still got over a terabyte of old RAW and JPEG's going back to Jan 2007. I nearly deleted a load of the older ones but a recent order for a shot I'd taken three years ago and had to completely revisit the file 'cos I'd resized the original but forgot to save the full-sized edit. :)

I keep trying to do the normal 'man' thing and shove 'em up in the loft or in the shed but I'm worried about damaging my hard drives! :D :wacky:

Si
 
I use multiple LR catalogues; 1 for personal each year, then 1 for every job

delete the crap only in job stuff then it gets kept on externals afterwards

for personal I prune aggresively as catalogues can clear 200gb
 
I'm actually quite ruthless :p

I only keep the RAW files of the shots I deem to be keepers & therefore process. Everything else gets binned :D

For the shots I process, I keep the RAW, the processed .psd with layers intact, a sharpened hi res TIFF & a low res jpg.
 
Grendel said:
I'm actually quite ruthless :p

I only keep the RAW files of the shots I deem to be keepers & therefore process. Everything else gets binned :D

For the shots I process, I keep the RAW, the processed .psd with layers intact, a sharpened hi res TIFF & a low res jpg.
Click to expand...

Organised!

I like it.. ;)
 
Only have about 5000-10000 stored in my LR catalog.

I delete all the pointless shots where ive been fidding in my room etc. But I keep all raws from shoots and keep them in LR.

Better break down though:
Working stuff gets stored on my main drive, where i also keep exported jpegs of max 1200x1200 size (so usually 1200x800) at 80% quality. A smaller file hieght 450 gets stored on my web server. Everything im not using gets stored on an archive drive.

I plan to compress all the raws from pre this academic year (at uni), and archive properly on 2 sets of disk, so i still have access to them, just not clogging hard disk space.
 
Keep anything that is worth keeping and when I've edited all the pics, for a job if i've printed and sent the CD off after that I archive the set onto a HDD which frees up space for the next one.

2TB HDD was £99 yesterday at novatech might be all weekend but worth a look :) i've nearly filed my 1TB drive with RAWs + 200oddGB on my mac etc...
 
I copy everything from the cards to pc, view in ViewNX (Nikon RAW viewer) and delete all the out of focus, blurred or pure rubbish before converting the what I class as ok (I'm new to this and what I think is ok compared to others may be way different :)) to DNG using the free Adobe converter.
Then they get imported to Lightroom to be worked on.

All the files are then backed up to another pc, an external drive which is taken to work and backed up to my work pc!
 
I keep everything but am occasionally forced to delete stuff...when I say forced, I had a hard drive die (it fell off the table while switched on during a desk-tidy) and lose about two years worth of work images and all my personal digital files going back 5 years...I was actually in the proccess of plugging-in the new 1Tb drive to back it all up to...lol
Keep it all, back it up twice.
 
cut to the chase...
either you get larger storage and headaches finding stuff
or edit with a vengeance
we all become attached to our tests and such
really keep what you would print in the future

i am in the same boat and wearily throwing out my ...'work'
 
i keep pretty much everything, i have to up to a point as theyre all for sale on the interweb.

i need to reassess my storage soon, especially with the size of the 1D RAW files compared to my old 20D...
 
I back up the original RAW files to DVD & hard drive as soon as I've dumped the cards onto my PC.

Then after whittling down to work out which images are going to go through post, I again backup the resulting PSD files to DVD & hard drive.

I destroy (as in, no backups anywhere and not on my PC) very very little; Pretty much only test shots get deleted.
 
I keep mine even the really bad ones I don't know why LOL

I use a series of HDD and DVD's and I have multiple copies which makes it worse, keep meaning to sort it all out and I need to work out how to use lightroom libraries soon.

I did have a purge on my prints from pre digital days, put anything wrth keeping in an album and shredded the rest a few years ago.
 
I try to delete the not so good ones whilst processing each new batch
I do have a few thousand stored thou.
Storage is cheap to be honest, I would rather spend a few quid on a 1T hard drive than risk deleting something that I later find I wanted!
 
only keep the good ones because as you progress and look back, you'll go 'what did i keep that for'
I keep the originals on external hard drives and keep them in a safe place!
 
I back up to disc, having had a couple of hard drive total failures nearly ruining my business, all photos go onto DVD and on a seperate hard drive as well. Infact I am so paranoid about backing up my business client data, it is on 2 internal hard drives across 2 computers- on 2 external hard drives and 2 dongals as well as the working version in daily use.

Realspeed
 
I kept all of my photos, every single one I took with my 350d. Plonked them on an external HDD. Then my brothers PC went bye-byes and needed to stick his HDD in my computer, so opened up the caddy and....

dropped the hdd

3 years of originals gone :(

So once I start taking more pictures I am going to get an icy-box mirrored raid 1TB drive setup so make sure I am at least a little protected.
 
keep everything, storage space is cheap and you never know when you may need to re-visit something for whatever reason, besides I'm such a computer numpty I'd probably delete the keeeprs by accident.

Hugh
 
I also never delete anything, there is a solution to this. Theres a few places doing seagate 2TB hd drives for £70, im sure 2 of these would last any of us hoarders.
 
Not a bad price, although I'd never trust a Seagate drive again. I've had too many of them go tits up with no warning whatsoever. Never had a Western Digital or a Maxtor die on me though.
 
maxtor get a very bad rep, they are in effect seagates budget sister brand. 95% (approx lol) of hard drive failures i have seen have been maxtor.

but then with hard drives youll always get someone saying something like the above about any brand..
 
Having just spent a whole day trying to sort out my frankly appalling work flow / filing system I have to wonder why I have kept so many of my raw images! I need to prune hard and ditch those that will never be processed.
 
neil_g said:
as long as you remember RAID1 is not a backup method and you have a separate copy of your data ;)
Click to expand...

Of course :) its just a way to protect yourself from a single hdd failure and still maintain your data.
 
I'm in a pruning stage now. I burn everything I want to keep to dvd twice and then sack it all off the HD.
 
neil_g said:
maxtor get a very bad rep, they are in effect seagates budget sister brand. 95% (approx lol) of hard drive failures i have seen have been maxtor.
Click to expand...

At one time, yes, Maxtor did have a pretty high failure rate amongst the population at large, but once we started seeing drives of 20Gig and larger, their quality control and production quality improved, and I've never had a single drive badged as Maxtor fail. Admittedly, it's been about 5 years since I last owned a Maxtor drive, and I am now exclusively Western Digital across all my machines for both internal and external hard drives.

I have had 5 or 6 drives labelled Seagate (including 2 in Dell Zino HD machines bought within the last 3 months) completely die on me with no warning whatsoever.
 
Kaouthia said:
At one time, yes, Maxtor did have a pretty high failure rate amongst the population at large, but once we started seeing drives of 20Gig and larger, their quality control and production quality improved, and I've never had a single drive badged as Maxtor fail.
Click to expand...

sorry disagree, this has been the case in newer 60Gb+ units for us also.

but then like i say everyone has a different brand horror story.
 
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