What do you do with all your RAWS?

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WhiteLight

Senior Member
As the subject states, how do you guys deal with RAW files over time?
I've just been shooting for less than 6 months now & i have over 10k RAW files on my HDD.
i decided to sit down and work on some pics in LR & i just realized i have TOO many files..

do you convert to JPG/NEF & keep all the decent pics after discarding the really throw away types?
i need a method to this madness :p
 
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Rick M

Senior Member
I keep about 10-20% of my shots, only the best from each outing. After processing the are exported as Jpeg in a subfolder with the original RAW. From that I create a master file of my best work for website and personal and store them on disks updating monthly.
 
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Ruidoso Bill

Senior Member
External hard drives and online storage, it only gets worse. I am thinking of building a network storage solution that has 4 hard drives at 3 TB each.
 
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Robert Mitchell

Senior Member
I throw away any obvious bad shots. If it's a bad shot I know I'll never use it or try to turn it into a good shot. Once I have my keepers, they remain keepers even if they're not the images myself or my clients select as finals.

I only shoot raw files and my Lightroom libraries contain raw images plus the layered and processed tiff's created by Photoshop.

I'm very organized and have one 2TB drive for personal images and one 2 TB drive for client images. Each of those drives, respective Lightroom catalogs as well as a third media drive and the computer's internal drive with OS and Applications are backed up to an 8TB Drobo and the Drobo is only used as a backup.
 
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stmv

Senior Member
I buy a new 2 T HD every Black Friday, and each HD last takes about 2 years to fill, with each Drive overlapping the other by 1 year,

yes, great idea to delete, but not really worth the investment of times, when a new drive once a year cost 75 dollars (Black Friday price).

I'll delete the pictures in camera, faster then on the computer, or,, just deselect during the upload.
 
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Robert Mitchell

Senior Member
I guess it depends on your workflow and the applications used. If deleting images was actually time consuming or involved more than 3 seconds then I would agree that it's not worth deleting, but that's all it takes.

As I cull my images after a shoot, all images that have been marked as rejects are then deleted with a single click and that's that.
 
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vindex1963

Senior Member
2X 2TB external hard drives and like it's said above I don't save them all. I do redundant saves in case one the the external drives fail.
I save nothing on the computer hard drive and leave the externals turned off and only turn them on to save.
 
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Dave_W

The Dude
I snipe the Seagate and WD 3TB externals when they're on sale. Amazon is strange in the way they fluctuate the prices of these things. If you keep an eye on them you'll see they dip below $100 every now and then, that's when you pounce. And like vindex, I also do not keep them plugged in all the time, no need for the discs to keep spinning if I'm not accessing the data, especially since there's a finite number of spins on any magnetic hard drive. Although I understand that a non-spinning HD can also fail, I've several HD's that I've converted to externals that are over 10 yrs old and they all still work fine.....knock on wood.
 
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DTigga

New member
I think of it like the pre-digital world. Your jpeg is like your processed photo, your RAW is like your negative. You didn't destroy your negatives just because it took too much room. You kept them just in case you needed them down the track.

I hate the thought of deleting RAW shots because I'd be too concerned I'd want it again.

DT
 
BackdoorArts

BackdoorArts

Senior Member
The hardest lesson I've learned is that "almost" shots are no better than the bad ones. Pruning away the dross from a day's shoot is sometimes very hard, but it saves you time and storage. When I import a day's shooting I will immediately delete the obvious bad shots. From there, I go through and apply my edits in Lightroom. If something just isn't working with a specific shot, but there's something that I really like about it, I flag it and come back to it at a later date. At that point I either salvage or toss it. I probably keep no more than 10-15% of a day's shots. If it's not worth showing then it's not worth keeping.
 
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Don Kuykendall_RIP

RIP :(
When I am bored and really have nothing to work on of importance I sit down and delete, move good ones to folder with other like photos (Wife, family, dogs etc) deleting the ones you know are bad saves you time down the road when you really need to find that shot. I also have a folder of my all time favorites that I have spent hours in Post processing on.
 
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dervari

Senior Member
I archive them to AWS Glacier. That way they are physically and environmentally protected using data center grade hardware and DR procedures. The cost? $. 01 per gigabyte.

Sent from my ASUS Transformer Pad TF700T using Tapatalk HD
 
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