Freeing up hard drive space - throw aways?

skywalkerbeth

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Hi everyone

What do you do with photos you've culled? Especially when you find your hard drive free space dwindling?

When I am going through photos I've taken, the first thing I do is sort them. The truly bad ones get deleted immediately - out of focus, etc. Then of the lot that is left, I first sort into two folders - "don't bother" and "keepers". I keep culling until I'm down to a manageable "keepers" folder (knowing that NO ONE, including me.. will look at every single one of my photos if I put them online).

It's not that ALL of the "don't bother" folders are bad - it's just that they didn't make the final cut. Will I ever look at them again? No idea. So far, I have not. Will I later think "hey, these were actually good enough to see the light of day"? No idea since I rarely have time to go back through.

What do you do? Do you save even the also-rans, or do you delete them immediately so that you aren't wasting time AND SPACE later, wondering what to do with them? This wasn't an issue for a long time but I'm finally nearing the end of the space on my 100 gig hard drive. (not all photos obviously).
 
I think you will want to keep them.

Archiving images is something we all have to do. I recommend external drives or additional internal drives to backup all of your images. I also reccomend duplicate copies (using drives) sitting on a shelf.
 
hard drives do not cost much these days
 
Time = money. By the time I decide what I want to delete and actually delete them and free up space, I might as well have just spent the extra money on another drive so that I could have spent that time doing more productive things. Like taking more photos. :lol:

If you look around, 1TB drives can apparently be had for $200 or less these days.
 
Time = money. By the time I decide what I want to delete and actually delete them and free up space, I might as well have just spent the extra money on another drive so that I could have spent that time doing more productive things. Like taking more photos. :lol:

If you look around, 1TB drives can apparently be had for $200 or less these days.


huh? So you back up everything from a shoot? Good and bad?
 
When I download from my memory card I do a coarse culling. Shots that seriously went bad go in the trash.

After that, everything gets saved as a raw file. I download to DVD and stash them. My working photos are JPEG and are stored on the hard drive. I do not convert all my raw files to JPEG. I suppose my JPEG would be considered my keepers.

One of the reasons I do this is that editing software has improved tremendously in the last five years and I don't think it has peaked. Who knows, next year's editing software might be just the thing for that photo that didn't quite work.
 
Thanks everyone. Great points. I do have an external hard drive. I will be more creative with it - I'll set aside a separate folder on it for the "also rans" and keep those indefinitely, and get rid of them on the main HD. QED.
 
I keep everything.
 
huh? So you back up everything from a shoot? Good and bad?
Obvious bad shots with unrecoverable errors I just delete on review/sort. And plus I shoot 99% JPEG so it's not like I'll be eating away space like mad with RAW. 99% of my shooting is also my daughter, so they're all keepers. :)
 
I'll delete the complete crap ones right away like you said, and usually keep all the others for some unknown reason. But later on when I decide to clean up my comp and delete some pictures I end up deleting all the pictures I didnt make an edit of, or if its good right out of the camera I'll put it in the "edits" folder anyways.
 
I just bought a 120 gb portable HD. Its great becuase if i need to show someone else a bunch of shots at there house its easy to take my entire photo collection

BTW
It cost under $80 =)
 
So far, I'm deleting all but my keepers. I'm not sure how that will change as I get better, though.
 

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