25 Gigs of PHOTOS!?! End of year cleanup in progress...

For ease of use.. No, wait... So my wife doesn't accuse me of playing around on the computer, I offload my CF cards at work. Now it's time to clean house. Uh, NOW is the time to clean house. It's the last day of work for the year and I've got to back this garbage up to CD's.

Now is the time to say "No, I don't need 50 photos of the same bear in Cade's Cove. No, I don't need these near-miss shots when the Spot-On shot is right next to it in the directory."

I hate clean up day. Knocking 25-Gigs down to something manageable will be a nice result, but it's tedius at best, and distracting at it's worst.

Hmmm.... Maybe I should clean out the garbage when I'm offloading the cards in the first place? Nah....

You should consider a small portable external hard drive. Much faster than CD's.

or even back them up to a DVD ... 4.7gb is greater then 700mb ... but yea external HD is greater then 4.7gb dvd haha

Hmm.. I was thinking that 25 gig was sort of manageable. I'm sitting at 102 gig and change right now. I have four seperat backup schemes. My primary PC is #1 with 4 300 gig drives set up as a raid 0+1 array. then I have an old Dell workstation as #2. I spare set of disks in my wifes machine as #3 and finally offsite DVDs, lots of them stored at work.

I think Santa is going to get me an external DVD burner for my office machine.

It's not so much the off-line storage ability, it's the haystack hiding the needles. I love my children, really, the best thing ever to happen to me is my wife and children. BUT I do not need umpteen photos of them with their eyes half closed or blurry faces.

25 Gig? I've got that since September! And you don't throw out the "almost identical" ones because sometimes people want exclusive rights to a shot (client, contest, whatever) and if you've got several, you haven't burnt your bridges.

I usually cull mine as I go along. I download onto the computer and when I go through them if they are bad I delete them right there. Why keep a blurry photo of someone with their eyes closed?

queenbee288 wrote in post #4546740
I usually cull mine as I go along. I download onto the computer and when I go through them if they are bad I delete them right there. Why keep a blurry photo of someone with their eyes closed?

Same here. The longer I read POTN, the lower my keeper rate. I'm probably down around 25% these days. However, shooting only raw and converting to tiff for photoshopping chews up a lot of space. But space is pretty cheap these days. Four 320 gig drives are less than $300.

Just get a bigger Hard Drive. Never DELETE

I have around 400 GB of photos. I have 2 750 GB hard drives that I back up to. One stays at home and the other goes to work and then every Friday I swap them.

gjl711 wrote in post #4546763
Same here. The longer I read POTN, the lower my keeper rate. I'm probably down around 25% these days. However, shooting only raw and converting to tiff for photoshopping chews up a lot of space. But space is pretty cheap these days. Four 320 gig drives are less than $300.

My keeper rate is about 30-50%. I also shoot RAW but I convert to JPEG in order to photoshop the pics that need touching up. I've been looking at the 300GB Buffalo ministation portable hard drive but that runs $235. What kind of 320GB drives can you find and get 4 for under $300?

ssidiv3r wrote in post #4550126
... What kind of 320GB drives can you find and get 4 for under $300?

There are multiple drives out there such as the Maxtor 320 for $79 a drive or Segate has one with a 16mb buffer for $89. It takes 4 drives to set up a 0+1 raid array.

Jon wrote in post #4546692
25 Gig? I've got that since September!

I was going to say something like that. I have 1.5Tb in external hard drives, and at least half of that space is taken up by my RAW and XMP files.

gjl711 wrote in post #4550232
There are multiple drives out there such as the Maxtor 320 for $79 a drive or Segate has one with a 16mb buffer for $89. It takes 4 drives to set up a 0+1 raid array.

I'll have to check up on those. I have no idea what a 0+1 raid array is, I just want an external drive to save/backup stuff to so I can free up space on my laptop (which is my primary/only workstation right now) and it only has 120GB hard drive to start which now only has 67GB of space left. I ould like to get one portable and one permanent (stays at home) so when I go on vacation or someplace I don't have to worry about bogging down my laptop.

25 gigs is small change. I'm sitting on 90 gigs of photos - I've given up DVD backup, and hope that by having 2 HD's with a copy each night between the "master" to the backup, I'm fine.

I need to trim it down though. I do have a lot of duplicates!