Are you keeping all your raw files?

11 years 1 month ago #278559 by Tim Kelley
Even with back up hard drives, these photos can take up so much space. I'm just curious if you keep all your raw files or do you convert some to jpg vs tossing them in case you need them?

Whats your set up on this?


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11 years 1 month ago #278562 by garyrhook
All of the photos from a shoot get imported into LR. Then I do a backup. At that point I'm comfortable enough to clean up the SD cards. Then I i go through the images, mark the definite throwaways with a single star, mark the ones that jump out at me as 4 stars. I then delete the 1 star images because I'll never need them.

Then the hard work begins.

Once I've finished the editing, I get rid of the rest of the riff raff. At this point, the only images left are the ones I'm happy with. I do another backup.

No, I don't keep jpgs. I keep raw files, but only the ones worth keeping. Turns out to be much fewer than I shoot.


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11 years 1 month ago #278568 by Meskill
Before images are downloaded to computer, I delete the obvious ones, then when in LR I have a similar method by which I filter images. 1 star are for the trash bin, 2 star is for maybe and 3 are keepers. The 2's I'll come back another day and see how I still feel about them, either they move to a 1 or 3 at that point. All photos are kept on WD external hard drives.


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11 years 1 month ago #278580 by fbicking
I keep shots I take for others for three years endless if they are really good and I want them for my portfolio. Family I keep forever. Right now my Lightroom photo library is about 600 GB but it goes up and down. I have a 6 TB thunderbolt WD drive to hold everything.
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11 years 1 month ago #278594 by effron
I keep the keepers only, of course. The raw files are stored on a couple HDs, which are actually fairly cheap storage... ;)

Why so serious?
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11 years 1 month ago #278640 by Joves

effron wrote: I keep the keepers only, of course. The raw files are stored on a couple HDs, which are actually fairly cheap storage... ;)

:agree:
Yeah I always keep my RAW files, they are the original data. I would rather delete the Jpegs over the RAW files any day. Sometimes I even play with them again to see if I get a different effect from prior work.


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11 years 1 month ago #278684 by Jim Photo
Same here, most are kept by I never toss a good photo


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11 years 1 month ago #278904 by Stealthy Ninja
I keep all but the out of focus or obviously terrible shots.

I buy new HDD when I need to for backup. Right now I have 2x2TB HDD in my ol' mac pro that I use for backup, the rest go on portable HDD. I occasionally backup what's on my portable drives. To the main storage drives (which I should do so soon when I come to think of it).

Whenever my mum comes up from Australia I also buy a large HDD and back up all my family photos on that and give it to her to bring back to Australia. That way I am covered if something happens to my HDD in Hong Kong. I don't give her work photos though, usually they're back up on my office computer if need be and/or the clients have jpegs so they also have a backup if I really need it.

Basically I've covered on multiple fronts.

I don't make photos into jpegs and then dump the RAW files. That's kinda dumb IMHO.
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11 years 1 month ago #278944 by DKasler
I keep all of the RAWs on my "Photography" hard drive. Even the non-keepers. what is a ruined shot now may be something that can be fixed in a few years or with a newly learned technique.

I then back up all of my Raws daily to an external drive and follow it up with a nightly online backup. The wisdom being if you don't have 3 copies, then you did not back it up. One of the 3 should be off site. It does not have to be offline, it could be at a relative or friends house.

If you do not back up off site and your home or studio burns to the ground all of your data is gone as well.

My Photography - www.DrewKasler.com
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