Question for everybody (1 Viewer)

[dave598]

If this is in the wrong place please move to where it goes, and accept my apologies for placing it in the wrong location.

Out of habit from shooting fire scenes, accident scenes, photo assignments from the newspapers, etc when I am out photographing birds I take hundreds of photos. I sort through them and get rid of all of the bad ones and then sort what is left into the proper bird folder on my computer. I then process them and post the ones that I like here. I will have full size photos that go on Facebook and small copies of the photo that I post here. Now my question is this. Do you keep all of the photos that you take even the ones that you don't use or do you delete them. I am finding that my external harddrive is getting full and was just wondering. Now I have been going through the ones that I know I will not see here in florida and getting rid of all of those duplicates.

 

[Kits]

I delete.

 

[Farnboro John]

I keep more than I use (often a less than display quality photo will nevertheless show a feature I want to retain) but I do at least a three step deletion process first: back of camera, obvious out of focus once on computer, then a detailed study for almost exact duplicates, out of focus faces when rest of animal in focus and so on.

I archive to portable hard drives so my laptop generally has no more than six months worth of recent pictures on it. I think it would be a mistake to regard the capacity of your computer as your hard limit for storage.

I have been known to do a further sweep of older folders in the hard drives as I find one can be more objective (= more ruthless) the further into the past the photos recede.

Hope this helps.

John

 

[dave598]

I keep more than I use (often a less than display quality photo will nevertheless show a feature I want to retain) but I do at least a three step deletion process first: back of camera, obvious out of focus once on computer, then a detailed study for almost exact duplicates, out of focus faces when rest of animal in focus and so on.

I archive to portable hard drives so my laptop generally has no more than six months worth of recent pictures on it. I think it would be a mistake to regard the capacity of your computer as your hard limit for storage.

I have been known to do a further sweep of older folders in the hard drives as I find one can be more objective (= more ruthless) the further into the past the photos recede.

Hope this helps.

John

Thanks John. I have 2 external hard drives one that has all the fire police and assignments from the three newspapers I worked for and the other is bird and wildlife

 

[njlarsen]

Do you additionally have one or two extra with backup of the ones you describe?

Niels

 

[dave598]

Do you additionally have one or two extra with backup of the ones you describe?

Niels

Yes I have backups of everything

 

[John Nihon]

1) Good photos I always keep/backup.
2) Average photos I tend to keep/backup if I like or want for reference.
3) The rest I delete.

 

[dave598]

1) Good photos I always keep/backup.
2) Average photos I tend to keep/backup if I like or want for reference.
3) The rest I delete.

Thank you all. The issue that I have is that I shoot in RAW Format due to working with them in Photoshop. So the photos I keep are large files

 

[njlarsen]

External hard drives are cheap these days. Unless your backup is to the cloud? If so, backup the good enough to ext hard drives and the best to the cloud.
Niels

 

[John Nihon]

Thank you all. The issue that I have is that I shoot in RAW Format due to working with them in Photoshop. So the photos I keep are large files

I tend to use 4TB and 5TB (recently purchased one) portable USB hard drives for my backups. Small, light and easy to carry around if needs be.

 

[Andrea Collins]

I keep the sharp, in focus, pictures that show something interesting and/or are nice pictures. I also keep pictures that show something particularly interesting but are not 100% sharp. Everything else gets deleted. My pictures are backed up to multiple external hard drives, one of which is kept at a different property to guard against the risk of house fire/burglary. I spend a lot of time looking through my photo folders on long winter evenings and learning all sorts of interesting new stuff as a result. The original raw files are only stored on the external drives. All the pictures on my laptop are Jpegs.