For personal photos, what do you all do with the originals (i.e. unedited) and imperfect photos?

In the summer I took a course on photography so I’m very new. My primary goal is to take pictures of my family.

Currently, I edit using Google Photos and I store all my pictures there, and the edits are stored as copies. I typically organise the edits into albums.

However, I’m left with the decision of what to do with the originals of the ones I did edit, and the ones I didn’t - because there was something minor wrong with them (no eye contact, some slight blur, something or someone weird in the background or whatever.)

I can’t bring myself to delete any of them, the voice in my head is “even if they’re not perfect, who cares? you’ll want to look at all of these anyway when you’re old”… but if I don’t come up with a plan or decide what to do with them soon, I know I’ll create a big task later down the line of pruning through thousands, and likely paying for more cloud storage anyway.

I know if I store these locally (i.e. not the cloud) I can mitigate the factor of cost, but unless I store them all on a NAS with some reasonable RAID config and then a backup to the cloud, I won’t feel comfortable doing it any other way. Storing them all on one external HDD is asking for trouble. At this point, “mitigating the cost” is out the window as I would have paid up front for a lot hardware, new disks over time as they die, and cloud storage (again) for backup.

As I type this, I’m starting to realise this is in fact the actual cost of photography. I guess I need to draw a line somewhere; if I don’t want local hardware, then suck it up and only keep “the good ones” in Google Photos.

  • SignalButterscotch73@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    11 months ago

    If you’re a data hoarder like me then I recommend a blu-ray burner for important don’t want to loose stuff and a massive HDD for things you might delete eventually.

    A RAID NAS for temporarily important (work that you got paid for but will only retain for a set time before deleting etc)

  • strayacarnt@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    11 months ago

    It depends, if I took five photos of the same thing and two are good, then the other three can go. If I only took one attempt and it didn’t quite work out I might keep it.

  • Human_Contribution56@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    11 months ago

    You can get local storage for stinking cheap. HDD sizes are huge and cheap. You can get a dock for$30 and connect over USB. Or just buy an external HDD. More polished, like 16TB for $300. Just archive them all and don’t worry.

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    1·
    11 months ago

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  • DukeOfBurgundry@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    11 months ago

    Everything in Lightroom. Then I give them a 1-5 star rating. Then flag bad photos (unrated) as rejected. Then look at 1-3 star and reject other bad photos. Then - a while later - delete rejected photos.

  • jeeperjalop@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    11 months ago

    Reason why I keep originals:
    I keep the originals as I might want to revisit them to try out a new tool, new presets that I’ve created. Another reason is that sometimes I’ll get a sequence of shots of a particular team and they’ll ask for all of the photos taken, so I’ll go back and send them the pics. Plus storage is cheap.

    How I store all of the originals + the exports:
    Store them on a home MAS system, sorted by race organization, year and then race. I’ll add team #'s in the metatags so that I can easily sort by team number in Adobe Bridge.

  • KidElder@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    11 months ago

    Delete the ones I don’t like. I mean I take a thousand pictures on a two week vacation. I’m never going to look at 1000 pictures in the future.

    It will be narrowed down to about 75, rest are deleted. They have no value to me.

    If you don’t, you’ll have a few 100 thousand photos down the road just taking up storage and never looked at.

  • bindermichi@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    11 months ago

    What to do with raw photos:

    • transfer everything from the camera and card to a NAS
    • import everything into Lightroom or similar management software
    • go through the photos and mark bad shots
    • delete them
    • go through the photos and mark unusable shots
    • delete them
    • go through the photos and mark the ones you want to edit
    • go through the photos that are not marked for editing and select lesser duplicates
    • probably delete them

    Edit the ones you marked and keep the remaining in case you need them later.

  • Comfortable_Tank1771@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    11 months ago

    I’ve learned to be ruthless on my images over the years. Everything that is technically bad, boring, repeated goes to bin. I might leave some imperfect photos if I don’t have similar technically good ones. That’s before PP. After processing I delete most originals leaving only the processed jpegs. I archive raws only for images I might want to try different processing - king of “artistic” stuff, ones that I processed to BW and like that. Also for paid shoots. In very rare cases I might regret that I no longer have raw for some image - but the overall experience of browsing the archive and backup space required is much better now.