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03-26-2019, 04:19 AM   #46
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QuoteOriginally posted by AstroDave Quote
I am convinced some civilization 1000 years from now will have practically zero image/literary artifacts from us because all our storage formats will be obsolete/non-readable). Think about how we can read cuneiform stone tablets from thousands of years ago, and look at cave paintings from 20-30 thousand years ago. Nothing we are doing now will survive that long. I'm even doubtful about your Blu-rays disks.
I don't know; I imagine a sufficiently advanced civilization will have the capabilities to pull data from a 21st century SSD. They may not
be able to use it 'straight out of the box', but neither could 'modern' scholars read Cuneiform when first rediscovered. Similarly, many
trace fossils that are studied today using modern technology were virtually unrecognizable and unreadable a century or more ago.
Thus it's not unreasonable an advanced civilization may be able to pull data from current technology that we consider damaged
and/or otherwise unreadable.

To be sure, a physical picture will still be more immediate. Whether a box of paper photographs, (very perishable in the long term), or a box
of hard drives, (potentially obsolete and inaccessible for a long time until someone wants to 'science it'), represents the better long term
strategy remains to be seen. One thing's for certain; an awful lot of stone and clay tablets survived millennia of neglect. A reminder to
incorporate more imagery into my ceramics

03-26-2019, 07:45 AM   #47
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I hardly ever shoot in burst mode - my shots for a year total under 1000, around 500 unique shots. I save everything that is in focus and has a subject in the frame {a few times I accidentally trip the shutter somehow}. As I was digitizing all my film images, I discovered a number that I could 'fix', so I don't use "good shot" as determinant of what to keep.

I have two directory structures. I keep a copy of everything in a "camera backup" structure and a copy of "interesting" things {trains, family, trips, etc} in a separate tree structure. Every month I copy everything on the main disk to one of several external drives as a monthly backup.
03-26-2019, 07:54 AM   #48
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QuoteOriginally posted by PDL Quote
Remember, there were quite a few greenhouses made with glass plates from the US Civil War once it was over, because people did not want to look at all those images of dead guys laying around in the fields.
Yes, Mathew Brady went bankrupt after the Civil War, and his assets were sold off because not even the Library of Congress had the foresight to preserve his work. It is also true that Texans didn't remember the Alamo for many years, so today part of the original "footprint" is occupied by a modern bank tower. I will do what I can, so my heirs will have all options open to them. I'm not going to be fatalistic and just destroy things.
03-26-2019, 12:12 PM   #49
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QuoteOriginally posted by iheiramo Quote
Nowadays I delete a lot. Typically somewhere between 90-99%. I like the digital age with possibility to shoot a lot and pick the best. I take multiple frames even from static objects, especially hand held, and pick the sharpest one in post.

I import all to C1. Everything that is not processed into jpg after I'm gone thru the session gets deleted. I often also delete the RAWs and jpgs from the shots that are stiched to panorama or Brenizer.

From travel shots I keep shots at higher rate. Maybe around 75% gets deleted.

I used to keep everything, but as I got more active in photography and more careless with shutter button, I realized I had no need for the weaker ones.
I never "delete" the RAWS. Every new iteration of RAW converters basically redesigns the RAW conversion, it is like getting a completely new emulsion in the old film days. I have visited old PEF files from my *ist Ds that were processed under Capture One v3 and reprocessed them using Capture One v12. The difference is pretty impressive and this also implies that those files I would have "deleted" are now really quite useful and printable. As RAW conversion marches on, old marginal images begin to fall in the range of acceptable material. I am sure that you Adobe users see the same sort of thing when you compare Camera Raw X to X+4. Heck, now that X-Rite has included the ability to create ICC profiles from RAW images, I can customize how each of my cameras (I still have my K-10D, K-20D and my K-3II) will respond to individual light sources.

So, to reiterate, I don't throw anything away. Now when my son inherits my "stuff", I am sure he will get rid of most of it. That's just the way it is.

03-26-2019, 01:12 PM   #50
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QuoteOriginally posted by normhead Quote
I shudder to think how many hard drives I'd own if i didn't.
Let's do the math. With a rated shutter life of, say, 300000 (=3e5) images, and generous 50 megabytes (5e7 bytes) per image, that would be 15e12 bytes, or 15000GB or 15TB per fully worn out shutter if you kept absolutely everything in both RAW and JPEG. Basically available as a single 3.5" disk nowadays.

Culling just to remove the obviously bad shots, I'm at 1/20th of that at the moment. But growth has accelerated with the K-1.

---------- Post added 2019-03-26 at 21:49 ----------

I found good culling workflow suggestions on https://updates.fastrawviewer.com/data/pdf/FastRawViewer-Suggested-Raw-based-Workflow.pdf, both for the "keep only selected" and the "reject selected" approaches, and an option of how to keep the rejected ones too. The workflows try to avoid write operations to memory cards and the associated risk to lose pictures from the card in case of defects.

FastRawViewer btw., is a tailor-made program to optimally support those workflows and has very useful tools to assess the quality of raw files without having to fully "develop" them. With a little muscle memory, the process can entirely be keyboard-driven and be fairly quick.
03-26-2019, 03:29 PM   #51
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For film photography, I keep all my negatives along with a proof sheet unless the whole roll is a waste.

For digital I do an initial cull based on obvious flaws and additional culls whenever I revisit a session's files. I only keep archive DNG/PEF files and Lightroom catalog files. I also keep copies of JPEGs shared to the Web, but mostly for convenience should I wish to reuse them for another purpose at a later date. At present, I am only retaining about 25% of digital I have shot since year 2000.


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03-27-2019, 03:07 AM   #52
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QuoteOriginally posted by tvdtvdtvd Quote
I don't know; I imagine a sufficiently advanced civilization will have the capabilities to pull data from a 21st century SSD. They may not
be able to use it 'straight out of the box', but neither could 'modern' scholars read Cuneiform when first rediscovered. Similarly, many
trace fossils that are studied today using modern technology were virtually unrecognizable and unreadable a century or more ago.
Thus it's not unreasonable an advanced civilization may be able to pull data from current technology that we consider damaged
and/or otherwise unreadable.

To be sure, a physical picture will still be more immediate. Whether a box of paper photographs, (very perishable in the long term), or a box
of hard drives, (potentially obsolete and inaccessible for a long time until someone wants to 'science it'), represents the better long term
strategy remains to be seen. One thing's for certain; an awful lot of stone and clay tablets survived millennia of neglect. A reminder to
incorporate more imagery into my ceramics
I'm really not too concerned about archaeologists 1000 years from now. The bigger question is if my kids and family can find images of the past that they will enjoy looking at. From that standpoint, I don't know that there is a big difference between hard drives and blue ray disks, although all of these things have failure rates and who knows how easy it will be to boot them up in thirty years.

On one hand there will probably be people around who specialize in data recovery of old hard drives (for a fee), on the other, it may not be worth it to anyone to mess around with old RAW photos that I have stuck on several hard drives.

03-27-2019, 03:32 AM   #53
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QuoteOriginally posted by Rondec Quote
The bigger question is if my kids and family can find images of the past that they will enjoy looking at. ..., it may not be worth it to anyone to mess around with old RAW photos that I have stuck on several hard drives.
I could imagine that my daughter, who caught the photo bug, may try to (re-)develop an image, that she has connection to, for a larger print. Everybody else basically uses a curated set of JPEGs and ultimately - for the first purpose, traditional albums with printed pictures, at best checking for the JPEG when ordering another print of one.

So realistically, the RAW files are for my own use only.
03-27-2019, 05:42 PM   #54
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I delete 2/3 or more of my photos, it's a mix of over exposed, underexposed, out of focus, and the ones that come out right I keep.
03-27-2019, 05:58 PM   #55
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I practically keep everything.

All the keeper in a phycial harddrive at home then the same copy + everything else and in between go to Amazon Prime colud storage. They offer unlimited storage for photo only. That's include .DNG... so... I put +TB of .DNG and JPG in there.
if someday Amazon want to limited or for some reason lost file, just like MySpace just done to themself (loosing every photo of their client from Aug. 1, 2003 to 2015.) I still have the good one at home.
03-31-2019, 03:15 AM   #56
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Generally I save about 40% of any days shooting. Depending on the location activity and subject, I try not to press the shutter button unless I know I have the proper settings and composition. I cull as soon as I am able, often by viewing them in-camera while I'm having a post shoot drink. If a shot has obvious technical flaws in the LCD , downloading them to a 27" monitor will not make them look better. After download, I do a quick page-through of each shot, then I go to a thumbnail view and delete blocks of poor or redundant shots. After all that, I am ready to start initial post-processing, but even then, after cropping and sliders, I'll realize the shot was not that great, and I will not waste time trying to improve it. I do tag my remaining shots so I can find them when I need to. I also give titles to most if not all of my keepers. "img-02-13-18" is a lot less descriptive or interesting than "Baghdad looking east from the Euphrates."

The only exceptions to this rule are pictures of family members, friends, and once-in-a-lifetime opportunities.

Last edited by robgski; 03-31-2019 at 03:22 AM.
03-31-2019, 04:51 AM   #57
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My shots, film and digital will be handed off to my daughter who recently has shown and interest in photography and has her own Pentax camera and has said she wants my collection of photos. I keep all negatives and slides, all digital RAWs, I don't shoot jpgs so the the only ones of those saved are the ones I convert and upload to Flickr. All are copied once a month to two different external harddrives.

Last edited by photolady95; 03-31-2019 at 05:00 AM.
04-02-2019, 03:18 PM   #58
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I am much better at deleting shots and culling. If I have a series of similar photos, I try to keep 10% at the most. While historically (I used to keep it all), I've been able to make shots I delete now look good in a raw editor, I find it inefficient to have many of a similar shot. It makes culling harder (later) and it means I'll spend more time in PP of photos.

So for a scene, I may keep 1 to 3 shots. The only exceptions get to be family, but even then I only keep relatively unique shots.

In terms of storing a lot of photos and finding them:

1. I geotag most photos except those taken close to home, which includes tagging the location info (city, state, country, etc)
2. I tag all photos with a minimum of 1 keyword. I have an action that will write the location info into a hierarchical keyword, and often that is satisfactory for me. If there is a person I know, I'll try to include one for the person. And then, maybe I'll add one item significant to the shoot. If one or two photos have something unique, I might add a keyword that way.
3. All my photos are generally in folders by date with the most significant keyword from step #2 in the folder name (usually location).

The above allows me to efficiently find an image while limiting tagging so that I can tag a full day's worth of images on import. I quit going image by image and drilling into multiple keywords long ago. Doing the above on a whole folder is usually enough except maybe the people part, which I try to keep to the images the people are in.

It works, and I can almost always find a photos when I need it.

The caveat, is that my mind and memory is very much location focused. Dates fade away and things often happen a lot longer ago then I think. But if I am thinking of finding a specific photo I'll almost always remember where I shot it, and as long as I can group all the photos from that location together, I can then narrow it down by other items (date and other tags).

I do need to go back and cull photos from the first decade of this century. I didn't always practice what I do now, and I often dread going back to go through all those photos.
04-02-2019, 04:22 PM - 2 Likes   #59
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I delete 85% of my shots and 75% of what I keep is crap.
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