Original images, what to do with them?

[LeeLeeMelis]

Hey there everyone, I am trying to work on my workflow and make it more efficient as I know it is not efficient right now. Do you store the original and the edited images of your portrait sessions? I'm buying a new computer so I dont want to save things if I dont need to. What do you folks do? Thanks for your help!

 

[DeepSpring]

When I upload my pics they go into a "Negatives" folder. Inside there are sub folders named by the date the pic was shot.

My edited pictures go into a folder called "Edited". Inside edited I have sub-folders of named by either the date (if it is a collection of a lot of different kind of shots) or named by the event. For example "Alli Portrait may" is one folder. So far this has been working out for me very well. If I resize edited images to upload to the web or with watermarks or w/e I would make a subfolder in the specific event that is usually named something like "small" or "ps" for the photoshop files if it isnt a jpeg.


Hope that isn't too confusing.

 

[LeeLeeMelis]

That's not confusing at all, I just wanted to know if most people save the original or negatives. I'm just trying to save space and get rid of stuff I dont need. I wasnt sure if I even needed the originals. Thanks for your input!

 

[JIP]

I think that's a decision only you can make. I think you need to determine your own personal storage system and what images are important to you.

 

[AprilRamone]

I always store the originals, because I know I am going to improve my post processing skills as I go along. Someday there may be an old shot that I want to start over with from scratch instead of starting with the shot that's already been processed. I just got a 750 gig external hard drive for $300 from newegg.com to put my work on. I think as work gets older and I need more storage on there, I will back them up on DVDs. And then just redo the dvds every so often.