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.
Do you save all raw photos
All the ones I think I might ever use, yes. I'll delete the ones I won't have a use for.
how do you keep them in order
Separate folders for separate sessions/events and categories.
And what to do with edited photos.
Export them, upload them, delete them locally.
But I keep my catalog files which have the edit information.
I have RAWs in folders named year/month/day to keep them in order. Then i take from there to lightroom the ones i want to edit. Edited photos i export as JPG for sharing (usually export one full size and one instagram size if i share something there) and as TIF for printing. JPGs gets exported on my main photography folder, and at times i clean it up and put them in the right folders where RAWs are. Photos that go to instagram, i also send to my phone. Photos for print gets exported into folder thats for stuff that is going to go into printing (also rename the file according to paper used for, as they are soft proofed for specific papers), and once they are printed, i throw them into another folder in the print folder that is for printed stuff. At times i might delete some stuff i already printed, if i know i wont be printing it again on same paper, since print TIF files are pretty large.
My photo folders are also backed to icloud automatically.
They start in a folder one my local machine synced to OneDrive Sorted by year, then YYYT-MM-DD. I keep all the raw files (converted to DNG) My edits are mostly in Lightroom. Eventually, folders are migrated over to my NAS with the same folder structure. There they are backed up locally and to a cloud service.
I delete the RAWs once I’ve finished editing. There isn’t really a need to keep them once delivered. A couple of 4tb drives is all I need.