Do you keep your RAWs?

After going through my whole collection of the past 10 years, I've noticed I have a lot (and I do mean a LOT) of gigabytes worth of RAW files on my hard drives. But I also must admit that the chance of me ever revisiting these RAW files is slim to none. I also must admit I seem to be a bit lazy and a lot of times just import my RAW (+JPG) files into Lightroom, just delete the bad ones and then most of them are left untouched.

So how do you do this? I suppose the most interesting thing would be to import the RAWs, edit the photo's, export them to JPG in high quality and then either delete the RAW files or store these on an external drive for backup. But that's quite a bit of work, especially if I'd need to do this for all pictures of the last years.

I'm a 'snapshot' shooter, take thousands of pictures of the kids playing around the house, on trips, on vacation etc. Somehow I feel I cannot document my young kids enough, specially seeing as they grow older they love viewing themselves in those older files (they're 3yrs and 8yrs old).

So, curious how you guys 'organise' this overload of digital files.

I do keep my raws though lately I have been scrubbing my library and deleting lots of pictures in general.

Drobo at home and Drobo at work. Terabytes of stuff that I actually revisit more often than one might think. Deleting stuff just doesn't seem right.

Great question, I am in the same boat. For now I'm going to leave mine since you can buy external storage for so cheap.
But yeah if you wanted to save space the just convert all your Raw to jpegs then delete the raw.

I keep all my RAWs, and I still have every RAW I've ever shot, as well as every JPG and PSD I've ever created. I may be in the minority, but I never delete anything. I've occasionally needed a RAW that I shot several years ago, and those instances, while they represent about .0001% of my shots, are enough to make me keep everything.

I spent several decades in the music business, and I still have every audio and video file I ever recorded, on any format, as well as machines to play them all back. I haven't needed those files for quite a while, but as soon as I delete something, I'll probably need it within a month.

I keep all but the total trash ones (way over- or under-exposed, serious motion blur, way out of focus, etc). A few months ago I went through and culled out a bunch that I thought were decent at the time, but now don't meet my standards since I've gotten better.

I understand the somewhat 'strange' feeling about deleting files. In my case especially of my kids. But then again, how many (in succession) shots can one have of ones child eating cake, drawing stuff, jumping a trampoline...

I keep them just as I'd keep negatives or slides. Storage is cheap. I have some 760 gig right now, backed up on two other external drives and online via CrashPlan. Would take too much time to clean them out IMO.

CraigPatterson wrote in post #15941036
I keep all my RAWs, and I still have every RAW I've ever shot, as well as every JPG and PSD I've ever created. I may be in the minority, but I never delete anything. I've occasionally needed a RAW that I shot several years ago, and those instances, while they represent about .0001% of my shots, are enough to make me keep everything.

I spent several decades in the music business, and I still have every audio and video file I ever recorded, on any format, as well as machines to play them all back. I haven't needed those files for quite a while, but as soon as I delete something, I'll probably need it within a month.

Maybe it's time the Hoarders crew come into the digital age and create a new show. "Digital Hoarders"

RAW processing is continually improving. You never know when an old RAW file that you couldn't make work with yesterday's processing will become a masterpiece with improved processing of tomorrow.

lapino wrote in post #15941071
I understand the somewhat 'strange' feeling about deleting files. In my case especially of my kids. But then again, how many (in succession) shots can one have of ones child eating cake, drawing stuff, jumping a trampoline...

That's what i figure. I'm not a pray and spray shooter, but will at times take more pictures of something than needed. I have no problem reviewing them, choosing the best 1 or 3 shots and deleting the rest. Lately I have been getting much pickier and dumping maybe 80%~90% of what I shoot. If I'm not happy with it then, I'm going to be lass happy with it years down the road so into the bit bucket it goes.

gjl711 wrote in post #15941018
I do keep my raws though lately I have been scrubbing my library and deleting lots of pictures in general.

That's what I need to do to... I have a bad habit of just passing over rejects instead of deleting them...

gjl711 wrote in post #15941114
That's what i figure. I'm not a pray and spray shooter, but will at times take more pictures of something than needed. I have no problem reviewing them, choosing the best 1 or 3 shots and deleting the rest. Lately I have been getting much pickier and dumping maybe 80%~90% of what I shoot. If I'm not happy with it then, I'm going to be lass happy with it years down the road so into the bit bucket it goes.

Unfortunately, I AM a spray-and-pray shooter, but I do cull as I pull them off the card, keeping only the better ones; I probably keep 10-20% of them.

phantelope wrote in post #15941076
I keep them just as I'd keep negatives or slides. Storage is cheap. I have some 760 gig right now, backed up on two other external drives and online via CrashPlan. Would take too much time to clean them out IMO.

You uploaded 760gig tot Crashplan? Have been thinking about some form of online storage too, especially for those extra-sensitive files (newborn for example). But uploading gigs of files to something like crashplan is simply impossible here in Belgium.

phantelope wrote in post #15941076
I keep them just as I'd keep negatives or slides. Storage is cheap. I have some 760 gig right now, backed up on two other external drives and online via CrashPlan. Would take too much time to clean them out IMO.

It's cheap in the grand scheme, but I've got 14 Terabytes, so it isn't that cheap.

I've never considered myself a hoarder, just prudent. Should I consider my denial to be a warning sign?