RAW files, storage?compression?

C

Coxy914

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73
Name
Alistair
Edit My Images
Yes
Just wondering if people store their original RAW files after they have played around with the photograph and got their desired picture.

Main reason is that it soon eats away at the hard drive space and even an external 1TB hard drive is taking a battering with music and image files.

Is there a way they can be compressed to save space at all or not?
 
You can convert them to DNG which is smaller, but I would say get get more disk space, or even better get a NAS. Seriously disk space is so cheap right now, I don't bother deleting photos anymore. When I finish processing a shoot I more it off my main processing drives, and onto some external storage. If you get one of those quick access external Serial ATA connectors, you can just use bare drives.
 
I never delete photos, always keep all the original RAWs. My iMac has a 500GB HD so plenty of space for the moment. Also have a 400GB and 120GB external HD so i'm not short on space hehe.
 
I agree that DNG conversion does save space, anything up to 20% on some files. It's also lossless so you don't lose anything. To be honest USB and similar drives are fairly inexpensive nowadays buying extra storage isn't all that expensive.

One aditional option is to have a good look at your images. Do you have multiples of the same pic, do you need more than one? Also have a sort out and dump those that are not worth keeping. Do this a month or so after the event, it's amazing how much junk you can get rid of
 
I currently use a MAC and have a 1TB hard drive as a "time machine" back up. It's a once bitten twice shy scenario!! Losing 3 years of images about 4 years ago was not much fun!!!
Just wondering if I can partition the external hard drive as my MAC only has 320GB so will never need the full 1TB as a "time machine" back up so maybe an idea to use it to store RAW files on.
Or just bite the bullet and get an external hard drive just to store RAW files on so as not to clog up the hard drive on the MAC.
 
I think a combination of the suggestions would be your best bet. DNG files are RAW files, but are that little bit smaller than .cr2 or .nef etc, over a lot of images that can free up a fair bit of space.

Are you keeping PSD or TIFF files? They take up a lot more room than RAW files. Likewise do you keep a lot of jpegs, I find that it is just as easy to regenerate jpegs as and when I need them and when they have been used to delete them.

Chappers suggestion of going through your images and deleting duplicates etc is a good one, I did this and got rid of 1200 images out of my Lightroom catalog (1200 * 6Mb freed up a lot of space) and I need to do that again. After 6 months I only keep anything that I have either used, or think I am likely to use again. (Although all RAW files imported into Lightroom are stored externally). This way I'm able to work with a 120Gb main drive without too many problems.

You can partition your time machine backup, it is good to have your back up drive a bit bigger than your main drive, that wa you can keep a bit of history, but you could easily take 500Gb for other storage. I copy my RAW files to my time machine drive as I import them, so even files deleted from Lightroom are still there if I ever need them, although that hasn't happened yet...
 
cheers for the reply.

I do keep a lot of jpeg images.
Have about 20,000 on my hard drive and there aren't that many duplicates.

Not one to delete pics as they've all been taken for a reason. In fact the only ones I tend to delete are ones which are out of focus and pretty much unusable.

Think from reading your post, I'm best partitioning my hard drive/time machine and using half of it to store .dng or .nef files.
 
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