September 29, 2013
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RAW Original Images – Should You Delete Them, Or Keep Them Forever?
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When do you delete your original RAW images? Should you keep your originals forever? Ah, the eternal question. Pun intended?
My latest Ramblings: (Don’t worry, this topic will be brought up many, many more times I’m sure! But feel free to comment if you have any other questions…
First and foremost, if you’re a hobbyist then you can do whatever you want. This post is mainly directed at professional wedding and portrait photographers, simply because they are the most likely to experience “hey can you look for more photos?” situations from their clients, even years down the road.
Yep, as a wedding photographer I keep all RAW “keepers” forever. RAW rejects get deleted after satisfactory delivery of any final product, such as a wedding album etc. If you’re truly OCD you can keep mid-rest JPGs of your reject files too, but I’m pretty liberal with what I keep so I feel this isn’t always necessary.
However anyways to be honest as a post-production specialist, I feel that if a professional photographer does not make enough money to afford the relatively low cost of a few TB worth of storage per year that it would take to store your keepers permanently, well, there’s something wrong with how much you’re charging compared to the sheer volume of work you’re doing. Or maybe you need to cut back on “spray and pray” with your 36 megapixel RAW files, or if it’s a Nikon you can turn down the RAW bit rate to 12, and the RAW compression to “lossy”.
In other words on the one hand f you don’t shoot very much, you should be able to fit 1-2 years worth of work onto a single 1 TB hard drive, which go for $70 or so these days. (Even in the small portable form!) Or on the other hand if you shoot an absolute ton of work and you just spray-and-pray like a maniac, you should at least be making enough money to afford the 2-3 3TB externals (usually around $100) that it would take to permanently archive your keepers. If you can’t afford that small expense, you shouldn’t be in business.
To be clear, I’m not accusing people of running their business wrong, I’m actually just trying to point out a major flaw in most people’s workflow solutions: They let stuff pile up. They assume that every last gig they’ve ever shot right needs to be at their fingertips on their computer or some massive high-tech external device. This is simply NOT a good idea.
Your workflow should consist of an “INBOX / OUTBOX” type workflow system, and dual external hard drives on a 1-2 year cycle archival solution. You simply cannot afford to let stuff accumulate on your computer, especially after you have fully edited and delivered it. Get it off your computer, onto (preferably two, and stored in separate locations) external hard drives.
Honestly, do you really need that wedding you shot three years ago, at your fingertips on your computer? Do you really need to have the last 5 years of work at your fingertips on some big-ass Drobo or something? No. In fact it takes me all of 30 seconds to reach over to my archival shelf / drawer, grab my 2005 external, and boot it up. And unlike a Drobo or other massive, high-TB solution, the backup copy of my data is not stored inside a redundant device that could easily be stolen or damaged in a fire etc. …it’s somewhere else entirely, safe and sound. That is why I don’t advise trusting singular devices for long-term archival, even if they brag about how they protect you against hard drive failure. In reality, hard drive failure doesn’t count for NEARLY as much data loss as theft, disaster, or sheer human stupidity.
Personally, I like to have a computer with a two-drive solution. Even many laptops nowadays can have dual 2.5″ hard drives, but let’s assume a desktop solution for most heavy-duty workflows. Anyways one hard drive, preferably an SSD, is for your operating system and programs only. A 128-256 GB SSD will do here. Then another hard drive, as big and fat as you need, is where all your data is stored. Internal RAID 1 is cool, but not absolutely necessary. You do want to back up all data on this second drive somehow, of course.
But I digress. Either way, your computer itself it should ONLY contain your current “INBOX” and “WIP” work, nothing else. Maybe if you have a huge hard drive you can also store an “all-time best portfolio” …but I have a simple external 2.5″ RAID 1 device for that. (G-RAID mini, or my preference- the CINERAID enclosure which is BUS-powered via USB 3.0!)
Anyways, just start storing most of your stuff elsewhere. It doesn’t belong on your computer, nor on one single external drive. For example as a 12-24 megapixel RAW shooting wedding photographer, with a hobby of landscape and timelapse RAW photograpy, I still only need to budget 1-2 TB per year, and I just go out and buy new externals each year on Black Friday. You can either buy the cheap USB 3 externals like WD Mybooks, or you can swap bare HDD’s in and out of a RAID 1 enclosure.
The bottom line is that you gotta stay on top of your workflow. Since I have been doing private and group workflow coaching for many years now, and have managed post-production for a studio team of 6+ photographers, this is the NUMBER ONE DOWNFALL. You gotta stay on top of your workflow.
Take care, and feel free to let me know if you have any other questions!
=Matt=- PS: Support my addiction to giving free advice – Donate via Paypal, or by shopping at B&H.
