Hi Everyone,

I started offering photography services to my immediate circle for their art projects, modeling endeavors, etc. I am new to this starting only earlier this year.

The question I have for seasoned professionals and semi professionals is: do you keep ALL the photos you take of a given shoot? For example, I shot my friend, and we took maybe 500+ photos during the shoot. We sat down together another day and identified like 60 that she wants sent to her of that shoot (no edits, she’s doing that herself/outsourcing it).

The question is: what the heck do I do with the other 440 photos? I have like 15TB of space, so I can keep all the shots with no issue, but this surely isn’t sustainable forever. I come from an Engineering background where archiving files is the gospel (where I may need access to any given revision at any instant) but this might not be the case once my initial 60 “keepers” were identified and sent.

Thoughts and feedback?

  • msdesignfotoBEnglish
    1·
    10 months ago

    I keep them all. Every. Single. One. Of them.

    I’ve reached my limit for hard drives inside the PC case, but I’m about to buy an external network rack to add more hard drives. And since they are becoming larger, I will not need so many of them in the future (I currently have 1 TB, 2TB, 3TB sata drives and that space alone could be alocated to a single hard drive with today’s market).

    So get an USB My Cloud device if you don’t want to bother to open the computer and add an extra hard drive, and when you feel the time is right, get a network rack and build your photography storage device.

    I do paid jobs, mostly photo with video too, and the required space can be insane. My camera only has 24MP, and I shoot RAW + JPG. My video camera is not a top notch, 1080i 59fps 8 bit AVCHD, so I’m not the one to require a LOT of new hard drive space per year, but still its an average of 3TB / year I need to fit into my current system. Professional photographers and videographers need way more than this, but general rule of thumb, we save everything. We never know how and when we’re going back to an old shoot and re-edit a photo for some reason.