Film vs Digital: save those RAWs!

[Proteus617]

I was laid up for a while and had the opportunity to scan and review several years worth of negatives. A great learning experience and quite humbling. Film users tend to archive everything. It's my understanding that the digi crowd tends to archive the keepers and burn the rest. Anyone else out there sitting on an archive that they've taken the opportunity to review? I'd be interested to hear about lessons learned, regrets, and new perspectives on old material.

 

[dhilberg]

I don't delete any RAWs (DNGs), unless they're obvious screw-ups. It's fun to look back through that stuff and say "wow those suck" or "damn, I need to do that again" etc. Memories really, even if the photos aren't technically good. Same thing when I was shooting film. I only tossed the slides that were screw-ups like accidental shutter releases, etc.

 

[rokclmb]

I keep all the pictures i take with the exception of shots that turn out extremely bad. It really bugs my wife.

 

[reznap]

I'm a compulsive deleter..

 

[AlexPhoto1]

When I get my digital SLR (within a few weeks.. depending on my parents lol) I want to have about a 100 GB Partition reserved to all the RAW's.. except maybe the accidental picks but I just want to keep everything to be able to learn from my mistakes : )

 

[swoop_ds]

I admit that I delete a lot that are no good. Also, if I have three pictures of something that are basically identical, I only keep the best one.

-Dave

 

[fokker]

I try to be reasonable, I don't see the point in keeping photos that suck. It took me quite a while to get out of the mindset that every photo I take is a precious memory that must be treasured, because they aren't, 90% of them are garbage and I treat them as such. I'm glad I got rid of that mindset too as it makes organising and sorting through photos a much more pleasant task when there's not 12 photos of the same thing with only slghtly different framing or exposure. Like 'swoop ds' I'll just keep the best of a bunch of "similars".

 

[Boomn4x4]

I only delete pictures that are really bad... out of focus, way over/under exposed etc.

I run a few websites and I subscribe to an unlimited hosting plan so I have unlimited storage. When space on my HD space gets low, I FTP most of the images off to my webserver and archive them ,then delete them off my HD to make room for more.

If I ever want the old pictures, I can easily ftp them back

 

[pbelarge]

Boom
I see you are comfortable storing them online as opposed to external harddrives. I store mine on external harddrives, 3 different ones, one stashed in a fire safe.

 

[Boomn4x4]

Boom
I see you are comfortable storing them online as opposed to external harddrives. I store mine on external harddrives, 3 different ones, one stashed in a fire safe.

Sure, why not? The RAID protection as well as offsite disaster recovery is better than any method I could have at home. Then consider the cost of having 3 HD's for every 100GB of data, I'd be buying 3 hard drives every 2 years. 20 years from now, I'll have 20 hard drives laying around and 10 firesafes.