this post was submitted on 09 Nov 2023
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Photography

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A place to politely discuss the tools, technique and culture of photography.

This is not a good place to simply share cool photos/videos or promote your own work and projects, but rather a place to discuss photography as an art and post things that would be of interest to other photographers.

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Do you keep all your files from a job, and if so, how long? (alien.top)
submitted 1 year ago by shinobi441@alien.top to c/photography@viewfinder.pro
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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?

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[–] laila2729@alien.top 1 points 1 year ago

Here's my process. I actually don't store anything on a physical hard drive. I use cloud backups.

After the shoot I cull and edit the gallery and deliver. Then I begin the backup process. I create a folder in my cloud storage. One is for raw files. The other is for edited and delivered files. Later, say maybe 6+ months later I feel comfortable deleting the raw folder, and just keep the edits indefinitely. I only deleted an edits folder from 2018 just now. I will likely never delete a wedding folder. You never know when you can be someone's hero by having their wedding files.