I recently ran into a issue with hard drive space on my laptop. To be honest I am not the most consistent person when comes to photo management. Okay maybe the better way of saying it is, I suck at deleting photos.
To give you an example, I still had over 30 raw photos of that bird pictured above. I took those a year ago. I do not see a reason why I should be keeping so many raw images of something like that. When I first got started in photography I took some photos of my buddy’s old truck. Most of the pictures where either over or under exposed, I still had all of them. Over 200 raw images of crap.
I know there is a difference in what I keep when it comes to paid gigs where someone might come back wanting another print. But I haven’t had very many of those. Most of my photography has been for my own enjoyment. Other than it helps me get more gear I find it stressful.
Maybe part of the issue is that storage is so abundant now. I don’t think about the problem until something like filling up my laptop happens. After which I move the data to the NAS that use at home, but now after doing that so many times and not being consistant with where I put the data my photos have been spread all over the place on it.
If I was this disorganized with my files at my day job, I would’ve been fired a long time ago.
Over the past few days I have been re-organizing my images on the NAS and I have started over with a fresh Light Room catalog. While I am at it, I am converting all my raw images to DNG and deleting the old raw files. I am also going through and removing the images I consider to be crap.
However I still find myself struggling to come up with a good folder structure.
I would like to here from my fellow steemians. What do you throw away and what do you keep? Do you throw away everything except for the best photos? Or do you keep everything and just throw it into the cloud? I also want to know how you keep your images organized. There has to be a better way than what I am doing.
