I keep them all. Every. Single. One. Of them.

I’ve reached my limit for hard drives inside the PC case, but I’m about to buy an external network rack to add more hard drives. And since they are becoming larger, I will not need so many of them in the future (I currently have 1 TB, 2TB, 3TB sata drives and that space alone could be alocated to a single hard drive with today’s market).

So get an USB My Cloud device if you don’t want to bother to open the computer and add an extra hard drive, and when you feel the time is right, get a network rack and build your photography storage device.

I do paid jobs, mostly photo with video too, and the required space can be insane. My camera only has 24MP, and I shoot RAW + JPG. My video camera is not a top notch, 1080i 59fps 8 bit AVCHD, so I’m not the one to require a LOT of new hard drive space per year, but still its an average of 3TB / year I need to fit into my current system. Professional photographers and videographers need way more than this, but general rule of thumb, we save everything. We never know how and when we’re going back to an old shoot and re-edit a photo for some reason.

If you really want to back up right don’t use hard drives aka spinning rust. They can and will fail.

Get a tape drive. You can archive TB’s at a time and also make multiple copies and keep some off site. You need less local NAS type storage and properly organized it should be easy to go back 5 years and read the files off tape.

I cull out of focus/wrong exposure shots and usually duplicates. But I keep all the others. There have been cases where I have returned to an image (that wasn’t originally a pick) years later and done something with it.

Heck yeah!

I don’t delete anything, except if I can in camera I catch blurry or blinking photos. Generally I keep everything. I buy a hard drive about every 9 months or so depending on how much I’m shooting. I keep RAW photos from everything even weddings where I take 3000+ images. Keep it all because you never know what will happen in the future.

I know a lot of people keep raw files forever but I trash them after a couple of months - six, tops - unless it’s something I REALLY think I’ll revisit. I never go back and look at them, so they’re just clutter for me, and when there are too many I get overwhelmed when I need to find something and have to weed through thousands of images.

I keep the jpgs I delivered and that is it

Paid Gig: Forever

The culled shots are already gone, I not only don’t keep them, as far as I’m concerned they Never Happened in the first place.

But anything else? I’ll eventually convert the RAW to DNG for long term storage to save space but otherwise there’s no real reason to delete anything.

Copy #1 on my workstation. Copy #2 is backed up to my NAS, and Copy #3 is on CrashPlan off-site.

Yep just in case. Everything in production is on the SSDs I have like 5 T7s lol poor things. But yeah backup files go into my NAS and and offsite hard drive I update monthly. It’s not the best backup solution but I have an option for me to hold on to clients pics for x amount of time and I can charge $50 easy for lifetime access with asking. I’ll be dead before they matter lol

Everything unseen after a year or two goes into a zip file and then on to external drives.

Personally, I keep everything. Files go onto my external drive while editing, delivering etc… Then after project is complete they go into cloud archive.

Here’s my process. I actually don’t store anything on a physical hard drive. I use cloud backups.

After the shoot I cull and edit the gallery and deliver. Then I begin the backup process. I create a folder in my cloud storage. One is for raw files. The other is for edited and delivered files. Later, say maybe 6+ months later I feel comfortable deleting the raw folder, and just keep the edits indefinitely. I only deleted an edits folder from 2018 just now. I will likely never delete a wedding folder. You never know when you can be someone’s hero by having their wedding files.

I have all from start. It costs about 2-3 bucks per wedding to backup.

I have a 45TB NAS… and never deleted an image.

FWIW, I have been shooting RAW for almost 15 years.

Nooooo way. They get a sample board of the images shot, and once the client receives their edits it is their responsibility to save them. Make sure it states that in your contracts. I only hold onto photos that I love & want to share on socials or my portfolio- or turn into prints.

It’s a matter of personal preference if you want to archive all of your past photos for personal use.

Personally, the longer I have done this for work the less clutter I want to deal with. I shoot a lot of film & I do hold onto physical negatives from some shoots, but I don’t have that same sort of attachment to my digital work. All of this is to say, it’s really just up to you 😅 you’ll figure it out as you go.

Keep everything, forever if you are a professional. The time and effort it took to schlep yourself and your gear out to the site, potentially have a location rented, talent on site etc… you should justify keeping the photos. Get a SATA bay or enclosure to read naked SATA drives and store them in antistatic bags / safe place. Use GoHardDrive to buy affordable 8TB drives (choose the 5 year warranty). I think you can get them for $80… should be enough to store many many shoots with.

If you want to go to the whole next level of non cloud base archiving nerd-ery check out LTO Tape.

Also I recommend the subreddit Datahoarders for some good convo about data systems.

have like 15TB of space, so I can keep all the shots with no issue, but this surely isn’t sustainable forever.

I have 35TB of storage, 100,000 pictures on the drives, and probably room for that many more. I was tempted last year to go back and delete all non-delivered pictures from all projects more than 10 years old, but that seems like such a hassle. It’s easier to spend another $150 on a new drive.