How long/how much do you keep?

OK, so here's a question for you seasoned pro's.

What do you do with your photos? Do you keep everything or delete after a while?

I started shooting weddings this year and like this weekend just gone, filled 3x16GB SD cards. So that's nearly 50GB of RAW files and that's before editing and the inevitable size increases when I edit in photoshop.

I've so far not had a real issue given I have 3TB of space on my home server but it's fast getting filled up with everything (not just photos) and I can't keep loading dumping 50-100GB for each assignment for long.

I'm tempted to keep say the last 6 months on my server, then delete everything but the final JPG's I gave to the client. But I'm curious as to what others do.

Thanks

When I first put the pictures on my PC I Delete all pictures that there is no way I will use. after the sale is final I back them up on a Storage system and whip them off the PC. when the back up drive get full I buy a new drive. but I keep and have a record of all Pictures. now that composites are getting popluler you never know when something in the picture will be useful. and you never know one day some one may want or need a new copy. house burned down, or they were stolen.

Delete the images that aren't keepers - keep the RAWs and output files for the keepers.

Buy a shed load of external drives and archive off old photos at the end of the year to keep them.

I delete culled images 3 months after the wedding DVD/album are delivered. I keep the RAW files, a jpeg version, any PSDs (I don't do many), and the album PSD spreads (about 1GB per album).

See my workflow here. It has an archive process built in, not everything has to remain instantly available forever.

hard drives are cheap especially around Black Friday. It takes time to go through the pictures and erase the non keepers, so I usually just keep them. I recommend having multiple drives to.

Right now my method is to backup a new shoot onto my laptop hd and three external's, the one on the laptop is the working files that will eventually get backed up to the other three 3tb usb3 hd's. Im tempted to change this up a bit, keeping only the raw files on two of the externals and then upload the finished jpgs that got ordered to an online host for long term storage.

I do charge an archival fee to access pictures after a certain period of time, right now thats 3 months but im tempted to change that to 1 month, as motivation for them to get the orders in faster.

And how many pictures are you fitting onto a 16gb sd card? I fit about 400 with my 18mp camera, and 1200 pictures at a wedding seems a bit excessive to me. How many will you take the time to process for the customer and how many will they actually end up paying for?

Professionals tend to cull anyway, at least wedding professionals, so there's no harm deleting the rejects.

As said - hard drives are cheap. Time is not. I keep everything.

Cheers.

dav

I back up everything from each shoot to an external hard drive as soon as possible. Once the job is complete, I save the fully edited RAW files and jpg conversions to 2 discs. One I keep in my office, the other I store elsewhere for added security. I can then delete the job from my hard drive and computer.

I eventually delete files that the client never saw, but those they did I keep forever.

On top of that, I'm about to sign up for a service (probably Backblaze) that backs up my hard drive automatically and in the background. That way, I'm backing up files during the editing process too, not just the original unedited ones. With Backblaze and some other providers, they will also retain deleted files or old versions of files for a month or more. If you accidentally delete a file or original version, you're covered.

The other great thing about these services is that they are really cheap - Backblaze is around $50 for a year.

I cull out the obvious bad ones and then move the files out to one of my network drives. As noted above, drive space is cheap and I have about 15TB of drive space. I have a folder structure that works for me and all images are keyworded so I can find a file in very short order. I have had people from weddings come back to me several years after the event to get more prints. This is not a common occurrence but it does happen. I don't see any harm in keeping the shots you want. I've gone back to some of my personal work and re-processed them as my abilities and software have improved. If I had just dumped those files I would not have had that chance.

When you import photos (you can elect to toss the bad apples) back them up to 1-2 externals AND burn DVDs for offsite backup. You never know...

If you're shooting 50GB at a single wedding, you should re-evaluate your system I typically fill about 3-4 4GB cards.

I don't shoot weddings and only deal with corporate clients, so this may or may not be a workable strategy for you, but here is what I do.

It is advisable for me to keep the images as long as they seem likely to make me money. The first 2-4 years I get very decent income from the usage sales alone. But I find that after 5 years, there is little residual income. So my goal is to have the images available for 5 years, but after that I would only want to keep images that could have long term significance.

The reality is that disk space is cheap. Its far easier to pay a few hundred dollars to add additional storage, than it is to take the time to cull the images from previous shoots to separate the ones I really want long term from the short term. So, I've kept it all except the losers.

When I process a shoot, I mark the losers as rejects. I'll keep the shoot on my live working drive for about 6 months. When I hit 6 months, I delete the rejects, and archive the shoot to my archive drives (2 on-line copies, 2 off line copies).

In my terms and conditions, I clearly state that I backup all images, but there is no guarantee of their future availability and it's the clients responsibility to backup the files in accordance their own corporate backup strategy. This is further stated in a read me file in the FTP download, or on the disk jacket if delivered on disk. But unless disaster happens, chances are they will always be able to get their final selected images from me.

Thanks for the feedback so far.

Jerph, how big are your RAW files though? Mine are 25MB each approx. And the 3x16GB are for two photographers for a full day so I don't think it's overly excessive (is it?)

I'll start working out what I feel comfortable culling but it does seem the only sensible option.