this post was submitted on 09 Nov 2023
1 points (100.0% liked)

Photography

24 readers
1 users here now

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.

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
communick@viewfinder.pro
1
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
17 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

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?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] RootsRockData@alien.top 1 points 1 year ago

Keep everything, forever if you are a professional. The time and effort it took to schlep yourself and your gear out to the site, potentially have a location rented, talent on site etc... you should justify keeping the photos. Get a SATA bay or enclosure to read naked SATA drives and store them in antistatic bags / safe place. Use GoHardDrive to buy affordable 8TB drives (choose the 5 year warranty). I think you can get them for $80... should be enough to store many many shoots with.

If you want to go to the whole next level of non cloud base archiving nerd-ery check out LTO Tape.

Also I recommend the subreddit Datahoarders for some good convo about data systems.