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DPChallenge Forums >> Photography Discussion >> Save everything or cull?
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 10/22/2008 09:48:54 PM · #1
I just got a 50D and while I love the camera I'm having problems with how large the files are. My approach has been that I keep every photo I take unless it's completely black or really out of focus and with my Canon Rebel this was manageable. But, with the 50D I'm finding that I'm am running out of disk space constantly. I'm shooting roughly 32Gb a week so if I save everything that works out to about 3 months per 500Gb drive. So I'm contemplating deleting my images that I decide aren't keepers.

So what do you do? Keep everything and just keep buying drives or do you cull to save space?

10/22/2008 09:56:32 PM · #2
I cull. RAW files initially go into a folder named with the date and a brief descriptive name. The ones I think I want to work on go into a subfolder called "potential". I keep all the files for a while, but periodically delete the shots in the uppermost folder when I am sure I won't be wanting them and need to clear disk space. I recently added a 750-Gb external drive for backups.
 10/22/2008 10:12:42 PM · #3
Buy DVR's and keep stacks of those instead. LOL! I just need a better labeling system. Currently I just label them either with a date range or a holiday name.
 10/22/2008 10:15:02 PM · #4
seriously cull them, Im at about 3TB of photos on my network of the 9TB that exists and Im soooo not adding more, time to delete some pics ;)

-dave
 10/22/2008 10:21:27 PM · #5
I have only had my cam for like a month.. but its already a problem... so much so that I had to buy a 160GB external drive just for this. I clean every week so on my laptop I have pictures only from the running week. I havent yet capped the external drive yet;-)
 10/22/2008 10:23:13 PM · #6
Be your own worst critic. Easier on your drive, easier on your eyes.
 10/22/2008 10:57:34 PM · #7
Originally posted by violinist123:
Be your own worst critic. Easier on your drive, easier on your eyes.


Ditto.

A good portfolio is a small portfolio.
Some shots, however, are sleepers. These

begin to reveal an unrealized potential after, say, three months.

In the end. I'd want, say, thirty shots for posterity.
 10/22/2008 11:03:10 PM · #8
1. Dump all images to your hard drive.
2. Burn to DVD.
4. Delete the non-keepers.

That way if something goes wrong, you always have the DVD backup.

Here's my work flow:
1. Dump all images to hard drive
2. Choose the keepers
3. Modify images that need it and save as masters
4. Create web size images
5. Create 4x6 print quality (300dpi)
6. Burn it all to DVD
7. Send to printers

Later, I'll make 8x10s, but that usually takes more time. I'll also make 16x24s later. I usually can keep 3 months worth of events on my hard drive. Once It fills up, I don't have to worry about what to delete since everything is burned to DVD.

You could also by some external Hard Drives pretty cheap if you need to.
10/22/2008 11:21:26 PM · #9
I just shoot jpg, so file size is only about 4MB per shot. If I shoot RAW, the files are 34MB each. I would shoot RAW more if I was doing serious photography.
I use a Mac, and upload from a card reader. While the card is uploading, I preview, and delete the clunkers right from the card, which usually is about 1/2 of the total.
I then move the remaining ones into a monthly file on an external HD. I go through them and select the best couple of shots of each subject to move to my working file in my main HD. Twice per month, I backup to DVD from the external HD.
My working iPhoto file has about 20k images all the way back to 2005 in it. I can surf through the file, and usually within less than a minute, get a date for an event or group of images, then if I want, I can look the whole shoot up on the DVD backups by date.
It's pretty much the way Nullix says that he works it, except that I rarely make any prints.

10/23/2008 12:09:10 AM · #10
I shoot RAW, and also just got the 50D. I'll stick to what I have been doing all along. I transfer images from CF card to the laptop. Go through them using Bridge, and delete the poor quality ones right off the bat. Then select the best to do any editing and save them as large masters. I then take the masters and make web sized ones. The web sized ones stay on the laptop. The RAW files and large masters all get burned to DVD's. I also store them on external hard drives (the RAWS and masters). I have a 360gb external, a 320 gb external, a 40gb external, and my laptop has a 320gb hard drive.
 10/23/2008 12:23:20 AM · #11
I cull, but not nearly enough. When I get home from shooting, I dump the card to my desktop, fire up LR, and make a first pass. On average I delete at least a third on that first pass, sometimes up to one half. This tells me I shoot too much, but hey, "film" is free... After I play in Photoshop for awhile, I'll go back through and delete more. I eventually get to less than half of what I had on the card. Not often enough (and I should do that this morning) I dump everything from the hard drive to a backup drive. My backup is 500G and it's not full yet - has everything from 2005 and up on it, so I'm not doing too badly at the moment.
 10/23/2008 12:40:29 AM · #12
A toughie. At the moment I am trying very hard to cull at first preview before I download. This means that I have partially filled cards undownloaded because I couldn't cull as much as I know I should. Getting better at it so that when I hit delete and have an instant regret, I say So what, and perspective is restored. I'd be lucky if I had 30 real keepers, but my judgment hasn't caught up to my better judgment. Don't have quite the size restriction of most of you (jpeg at 5mp), but from time to time empty stuff onto a dvd. It helps to have one or two pretty fair shots out of a hundred so you can delete 98 or 99. (But sometimes I just like the bad shots better).
 10/23/2008 01:37:00 AM · #13
Don't cull too hard. Sometimes when I go back a few months later I find an overlooked gem, or I find my PP skills have improved to where I can make something work now. I tend to keep what I move in my "Potential" folder, and not delete those.
 10/23/2008 02:03:20 AM · #14
Anything that's good just delete and especially don't enter into them into challenges. It's what I do. It's been going okay so far! in all seriousness delete it if you aren't gonna use it.
 10/23/2008 02:47:49 AM · #15
I tend to just throw out duplicates. The rest I can almost always use as spare parts (i.e. to clone in some minor detail, texture overlays, etc.) Although if I ever upgrade from the 20D that habit would probably end.
 10/23/2008 08:55:50 AM · #16
I never hear anyone suggesting this route...

1. I shoot Raw+jpg
2. I toss the obvious trash
3. I select the keepers that I will process (a commitment) and convert the raw file to a psd.
4. I keep that psd but also create an edited version
5. I create a web version but I don't create a print copy until I know I am going to print
6. I toss all of the undeveloped raw files - I keep the jpg version.

So of the photos I like, I keep an unedited PSD, an edited PSD, and a web-sized file. If I want to print I also develop a print file. I often toss the print-versions after printing - they are only upsized versions of the edited psd.

Of the files to which I was not willing to commit time, I keep the JPG. That way, if I decide later that it is a sleeper (or more likely I decide that a heavy-edit version might be fun) I will at least have the jpg to work on.
 10/23/2008 09:22:16 AM · #17
I usually copy everything to the hard drive, into 2 folders. One for the untouched originals and then one to work with. Once I go through and find the keepers, everything else gets deleted out of both folders. Then when I get enough keepers, I burn to DVD.
 10/23/2008 10:15:02 AM · #18
An interesting question from Scott Kelby of Photoshop Insider: Are We As Photographers Backing Up Too Much

I know I fall into this... I have a hard time deleting anything. And I back up everything.

And DVDs, for backup, are now officially a "dead option" for me. I stopped using DVDs as backup quite awhile ago (for practical reasons), but just last week I tried to restore one of my old DVDs and the files on the DVD were UNREADABLE!!! I know I had read all about DVDs "not lasting forever" but this was the first time I had personally experienced the problem.

So just as a word of caution: If you're backing up to DVDs, be sure to make TWO copies of anything that is important. Hopefully one of them will survive the test of time.


10/23/2008 10:35:03 AM · #19
Originally posted by dwterry:
An interesting question from Scott Kelby of Photoshop Insider: Are We As Photographers Backing Up Too Much

I know I fall into this... I have a hard time deleting anything. And I back up everything.

And DVDs, for backup, are now officially a "dead option" for me.
So just as a word of caution: If you're backing up to DVDs, be sure to make TWO copies of anything that is important. Hopefully one of them will survive the test of time.

Do you verify/check the DVD's when you make them? I do that, and have prevented several "Oops" moments that way. It takes an extra minute or two, but it is good practice to verify them as you make them. I understand that they can't stay good forever too. Try cleaning the disc in question if you still have it.

I end up with all the originals that I keep on both DVD and ext HD, so I still have 2 copies. The ext HD's are low enough in price now that it makes sense to just fill up one and buy another to keep going. A 500 GB ext HD is less than $100 now and will hold about the same as 100 DVD's.
How much are our originals worth, and what will they be worth 10 or 20 years down the road? I feel sure that technology and hardware will be changing as we go along, like blue ray replacing DVD's and who knows what's next. It's a lot easier to dump an entire ext HD into the next "latest technology" storage option than it would be to go through a couple of hundred DVD's.
I saved my jpg's from 10 days in Montana a couple of months ago as .tif files, and it was 51GB for the 10 days.

Message edited by author 2008-10-23 10:43:24.
 10/23/2008 11:02:07 AM · #20
Yea, I consider DVD storage dead. HD space is too cheep to bother with anything else.

Message edited by author 2008-10-23 11:02:19.
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