Need help figuring out what to do with my photo archive

[nerwin]

I need some advice on figuring out what to do with my photo archive that is on my PC now that I'm no longer doing photography. I don't plan on continuing to subscribe to adobe creative cloud just to access them via Lightroom. Obvisually I want to keep my photos and the final edits I've had made to them I just don't know what to do with them moving forward.

The only thing I can think of is possibly exporting them all in jpeg and keeping a backup of the raw files. Maybe get a fast external SSD and keep them all on there...I really don't know and that's been one of the biggest struggles since giving up photography. I have about 20,000 images all stored in Lightroom and they are organized pretty poorly at this point and gives me loads of anxiety on what to do with them.

Any help on this would be much appreciated. Thank you.

 

[adamhiram]

As someone who has lost significant amounts of data after taking too long to find a perfect solution, my advice is to figure out how much storage space you need, buy an external drive, and backup all of the raw files and Lightroom catalogs. No proprietary backup software, just copy the files to an external drive. If you never figure out a better solution, at least you'll have everything backed up in a format that can be easily read on any computer.

If you don't want to be tied to Lightroom in the future, it may be helpful to export all of your edits into sidecar/xmp files, which can then be opened in other tools without having to parse the Lightroom catalogs first. If you want access to all of your images, try running a bulk export of all raw files to a more standard format, such as jpeg so at least you'll have quick access to them. You'll obviously need a bigger hard drive for that.

Lastly, you probably don't need faster SSD storage for long-term storage, and external hard drives are cheap. I recommend getting two, making two backups, and keeping one offsite somewhere. I learned this lesson the hard way when I had a fire 15 years ago and all 3 copies of my data were in the same room.

Ultimately, a quick basic backup to a cheap external hard drive is often the easiest and cheapest solution, and will at least give you something until you figure out something better. If you need to make regular incremental backups, an inexpensive tool like GoodSync can simplify this process while still essentially just copying your files to an external drive. In my case, I never needed anything better and I still do it this way.

 

[adamhiram]

Adding a few links.

• Western Digital Elements USB external hard drive: (2TB) (4TB)
• Amazon Basics hard case
• USB-C cable if your system has newer USB-C ports

 

[Original katomi]

Hi I store my photos on eternal hard drive.
I don’t know if my method will work for you but here it goes.\
hdd for 2023
sub sections by the month
sub section by event in that month
ok hdd 2023/ dec/ day out in snow 2nd
store raw and jpg. Edited files saved as tiff
this year 2024 I have started a new hdd and already have sub divided into months

 

[nerwin]

Thank you, I appreciate the help. I already have a backup system...figuring out how to store them isn't a big deal really. storage is cheap nowadays, I just don't know what the best way to save my photo archive or organize it now that I've essentially given up photography that's what I'm trying to figure out.

I've even considered just deleting them all and letting it go because I rarely even go back to look at my old photos.

What does someone do when they did photography for many years and has semi large collection of photos and then stops shooting, what do you do? I can't wrap my head around it.

 

[Original katomi]

I understand. I gave up in my 20s a just burnt all the negs.

 

[sleist]

I'm not sure if your concern is that you won't be able to access your catalogue and LR edits if you cancel you subscription, but if that is your concern I see the following stated on Thom Hogan's Software Recommendations page under Lightroom:

"And no, if you drop your subscription, your catalog doesn’t go away. Some of the things you can do with your images do go away, but LR would continue to work for basic functions. And no, you don’t need to send your images to the cloud to use it (at least for Lightroom Classic CC); everything stays local to your computer if that’s what you want."

This would appear to mean that you should not need to export everything and a JPG to keep your photo processing.