Do you keep your old RAW files

OK, so I go to an event and take several shots. When I come home I only pick the "keepers". I have always kept all the RAW files (even the unused ones)...

I am curious if others keep all their RAW files or delete them.... Keeping all the files takes up alot of space...

If you didn't like the shot right after the event, what are the chances you will like it in a year?

I cull all of the ones flagged "rejects" and for non-important events I also cull the ones flagged "unmarked" only keeping those flagged as keepers. For most days though I also keep the unmarked ones since disk space is cheap. I suppose it comes down to how important the event is for you... would you ever browse the non picks? For something like my son's birth, yes, we will browse the non-picks at some point... but for Aunt Martha's 68th birthday? Probably not.

I delete the obvious rejects (OOF, drastic exposure problems, etc.). Everything else I keep.

Why keep a useless RAW file around? To prove I take plenty of crappy pictures? I have enough proof of that!

I use DownloaderPro and archive all of the original CR2s converting to DNG for review in LightRoom. I delete the reject DNGs but the CR2s get backed up to a Drobo for ALL time.

I like to think I'm pretty ruthless when it comes to culling the herd but I've still managed to amass a whole lot of 1s and 0s.

I periodically go through all my stuff and delete the photos that will never see printing or the light of day. I aways have a hard time deleting right after a shoot, but one month later I can be more "ruthless" hah!

I keep them all except for the obvious miss (focus, really bad exposure, etc.)
I have many images that do not make it as picks, but I do not delete them. And there have been times when that has worked out very well...

One time I did a family portrait shoot. I take several of the same pose. There were quite a few shots where they were obvious misses where most of the people in the shot were not looking at the camera, etc. I had one great shot that was going to be the big sell for a 16x20 print... but the dad had a funny look on his face. So I go back to the 'missed' shots and in one of them where everyone else was looking bad, the dad had a great look.... so I was able to salvage the shot using the dad from this one 'reject'.

Also, on two other occasions I have retrieved shots from the 'reject' pile to provide prints for funerals as they were the last shots taken of the person. Both of these were unremarkable shots, nothing outstanding, but suddenly became very valuable in memories to the families.

You never know... and, yes, disc space is very cheap.

I keep mine as well. I'll back them up using DVD's

Yup, I burn off a DVD of each card as soon as I come back from a shoot before I start processing/editing and then keep my keeper RAW files on an external drive.

I haven't had that many shoots yet, so yeah I keep all mine; however, when I get busier, I'm going to have to back them up on a disk or external hard drive.

I keep the vast majority of my shots for numerous reasons:
1) My PP skill gets better as time goes on - i may be able to rescue something in the future that i thought was useless.
2) I like to see how i have advanced as a photographer - and even the % of keepers/rubbish gives me an idea of how my eye is developing.
3) Space is cheap - it is a fairly cheap option these days to have a 500Gb hard drive as spare storage
4) You never know when you might want that one shot of Aunty xxxxx - even if it was a poor one in your opinion. It might still be the best one available.

Where I'm getting killed on disk space are my stupid TIFF edits. A typical workflow for me involves exporting from LR to CS4 to run Aperture 2 for film look and grain. Every single time I do that, a 160mb TIFF is created instead of just a 15mb DNG. And I normally don't want to delete the TIFF since I'll do other adjustments in CS4 before saving back to LR again.

Oh well, disk space is cheap... I just wish I could fit more in the laptop. I'm not looking forward to making some of my catalog external.

Weddings - yes.
Personal stuff, gigs, events etc, I tend to delete as I don't plan on going back and trying to improve the processing. If I went back into my photos to redo processing every time I got a bit better at photoshop techniques, I'd be constantly looking backward rather than forward.

I keep them all. I move them off to an external hard drive eventually. Just picked up two 1.5T Freeagent drives for $99 each, so storage is not really that expensive.

And, yes...I do go back and use the non-keepers. I shoot a lot of pets, and I've had clients coming back years later wanting to see 'everything' from the shoot...sadly, this is usually because the pet has passed away and many of my bad shots are better than their good ones.

doctorgonzo wrote in post #8763796
I delete the obvious rejects (OOF, drastic exposure problems, etc.). Everything else I keep.

Why keep a useless RAW file around? To prove I take plenty of crappy pictures? I have enough proof of that!

+1

Storage is fairly cheap, but keeping redundant backups of very large RAW files are getting to be a bit of a headache. I really need to work on a more streamlined process for this...