After editing and posting on 365, I tend to delete the original unless I want to save it for a particular reason. Now I'm rethinking that. Do you save your originals?
Hmmmm....I have been saving all of my photo's that I put on 365 onto a thumb drive, but i tend to delete the originals also. I am now starting to think I should get another thumb and save them too, just in case I would ever want to do anything with them in the future.
Yes, I will delete any photos I know for sure I don't want to keep, blurred ones, duplicates etc and keep everything else. Even though I shot only in RAW, hard drive space is cheap and you never know if you'll need it again.
@superbeyotch I've found thumb drives to be unreliable Chris and you may end up loosing everything. Ideally, you should have at least two copies of important photos etc. Drives will fail.
I keep mine and thinking of getting a super duper external drive also as they are just on my laptop at the moment. I wouldn't keep every shot but certainly ones I love.
It's either deleted in camera immediately after I take it, or it's not deleted. I also save any post-processing work I do via Photoshop as a layered PSD file, so I can go back to it if necessary.
I'm currently at 652GB, which is not much compared to many prolific photographers. They're stored locally on a RAID array (an array of multiple hard disks that can survive a complete disk failure without losing any data) and also backed up remotely using CrashPlan (an online backup service).
Both your post-processing techniques, and the quality of software (for example, noise reduction) improve steadily as time passes, so it's definitely worth keeping your old images. I've had a few images added to stock photography sites that I took in 2006, and it's amazing how much better I can process them today than I could back in 2006! Without the original file, that wouldn't be possible. The same applies should you wish to exhibit your work in the future, or even just print it for your own use.
@abirkill Great post, Alexis! I agree, I save my originals too! Some of the stuff I have done a couple years ago I'm almost embarrassed! Processing trends change too so its nice to have the choice to go back to some old images and try something new!
Echoing Claire (reply @claireuk) I have a tendency to save everything. I have files on the laptop, desktop and here on 365 all you need to do is copy & paste to a file. One of these days I need to declutter big time ;-)
I also shoot everything in raw and review in lightroom. During the review anything I don't like goes in the trash. I keep the originals and the final images on a 1tb external hard drive. I usually do a transfer about once a month.
I would agree with some other posters that I wouldn't use a USB thumb drive for long-term storage/backup -- they are quite unreliable compared to most storage types.
I'd look for a cheap external hard drive -- these are really easy to use, and just plug into a power socket and a USB port on your computer. A quick search online brings up this 1.5TB drive for $80 from Staples:
That would be enough for many years of photographs for anyone but the most dedicated, even if you shoot in RAW and have a high-megapixel camera. (For example, about 75,000 RAW photos from my 50D, or 300,000 full-quality JPEGs).
There are probably better offers around, that was just the result of a 2 minute search.
Depending on how much you value your photographs, you may wish to consider getting two drives and storing the photos on both -- that would prevent you from losing your data should a drive fail, which can happen.
Alternatively you could store them on DVD, if your computer has a DVD writer built in (many do). If you do this, you should be aware that even DVDs can degrade over the course of several years (disc rot), so you should test that you can view a few photos off your discs every couple of years.
@megsy good idea. I keep all mine on an external hard drive, and I mirror this once a month to another external hard drive. I figured that I have a few thousand pounds worth of kit, so £150 on two 1TB hard drives is a sensible insurance policy. I'm also such an OCD that I have a 365 folder on said hard drive, with weekly folders that everything goes in and monthly folders that my shots that make 365 go in!! I know, I need to take up yoga or something,,,,
Always... I hardly ever delete a photo, especially the ones I've deemed worthy enough to do anything with. I have thousands upon thousands... it's totally out of control haha! I use flash drives to back them up in addition to an external.
the way I see it if you shoot jpeg you have already undergone a compression...add any sort of edit...compression...another edit program on top of your first program...compression...any sort of compression is essentially a loss of data so I save original, then I save my edit copy, and I save one downsized plus watermarked version for internet posting
i save EVERYTHING! i've only just (duh) figured out how to delete photos as i scan thru them on the puter if they are totally messed up, so i have started doing that... sort of... regardless, i still have thounsands of photos that are mostly junk... i'm a bit of a packrat and am reluctant to hit delete if i think i *might* want one of those photos one day... as if i could ever find one if i *did* want it... sigh...
@loztsoul Trevor... i'd read that about the degradation of photos the more you copy them... but here's my question... let's say i take a photo and then i edit it to the way i like... i then copy the edited version to my 365 folder before uploading... is there a way of "moving" it rather than "copying" it to avoid this loss of data?
Yes, they are called negatives. Also the scans on the original CD, on my laptop, 2 external hard disks that mirror each other and Flickr. Not that I obsess over such things :)
@northy You will not lose any information if you just copy the file from one folder to another in Windows.
You will only lose data if you open the file in image editing software and then save it to another location, as this is effectively decompressing the image and recompressing it.
Note that if you use Windows versions earlier than Windows 7, the function built into Windows picture viewer to rotate an image (e.g. from portrait to landscape) also loses data, because it's also doing a decompress and recompress. Doing this in Windows 7 onwards is lossless.
@northy a lot of this degradation for our purposes isn't noticeable in the short term and using a prog that doesn't really change your original and works off a copy and renaming the copy is a start...I just think may want to keep original file for professional printing purposes so you can max size/max image quality
I used to keep almost every picture I shot - except for really bad ones. After (1) joining 365, and (2) getting a new camera with 1,6+ times the Mpixels and over double the size files, I tend to delete a lot more, to avoid running out of disk space. I often go back to places I've been to try and do better. That's a good reason to delete, as well. On my computer I keep a folder catalogue by date, with a folder catalogue of its own for 365. And of course I run a backup schedule.
I never, yes, NEVER edit my shots, the ones that I put here (apart from the HDR ones of course)
I think that a good photographer is the one that is able to take a good shot and don't need to edit the capture. Anyone can take shit shot, take som PS, aply focus, remove noise, change curves....or aply a filter and...tachan!!! A fantastic shot.
But not everyone knows how to configure the parameters on the camera to make the shot good at the first time, managing contrast, EV, ISO, speed, f stop... So yes, I keep my originals. You can see in my Flickr account ( http://www.flickr.com/photos/petaqui ) that I put on the description if I edited the shot or not and what changes I made. Most of them don't have any editing process, some yes because I'm not a good photographer, but my challenge is to edit less pics day by day. So this project helps me, because I have to put atention on my mobile (I use my Nokia N8 to take the shots of my 365project) to take the better of it and take the best shot possible.
Yes, I do. You never know when you'll need it. I usually add a frame but when you're entering a competition or reprinting a shot, the frame throws everything off. So I always have the original so I can redo the picture without the frame.
I have a special folder for all my SOOC shots...as I edit them I take out the ones that are blurry or just no good...but if I think I will Ever want to edit it in the future I save it...I am saving them on an external HD
I tend to delete after a complete divorce from a date taken i.e many many months down the road...I keep finding photo's I was not so sure about...rediscovered...almost not even remember having taken...that turn out to be some of my favorite photos lol...so so glad I didn't go delete crazy
I happen to have most of the photos I have ever taken....because at one point I came across some baby photos of Sophie and even enjoyed the crappy ones. So I rarely delete. I have become a photos hoarder
@petaqui A good photographer doesn't edit? haha It would be very very very very rare that an image you see in print/digital media or a gallery is not retouched. photographers have been editing images for a hundred years be it in a dark room or digitally. @mittens I personally save all my photos, I have digital images that were taken years ago all stored away safely.
I always remember the story about the photographer who (about a year before the scandal broke) took the photo of Monica and Bill Clinton at the Democratic Convention. The only reason he still had the pic was because he was still using a 'film' camera - and had all his negatives. The other photographers were using digital and had deleted their version of the pic - because (at the time) she was unknown - and therefore of 'no interest'. So.. you never know..
at the beginning i deleted the originals. Now one of my photos that i messed up with the quote is now there to stay. I now have 2 folders one for originals and the other one for the finished product to upload to the site/facebook. I really regret deleting my first few photos. But live and learn i guess.
Of course I keep originals...who knows what I may want to do with them. Besides I have to downsize everything to go on this site and I certainly wont want those little images for anything else!!!!!!!!!!!
My originals are kept in folders labelled by month and year. I resize for ease of uploading but the small versions are too small to print out or do anything else useful with. At the end of the month I go through, delete the ones I don't want to keep and store the rest on a USB stick.
I used to give the resized ones descriptive names but now I give them the same number as the original plus a short name, e.g. n-006-cityscene, so that I know which original it came from and also which camera I used (N is for Nikon).
I'm working towards getting photos as right as I can in taking them so that I don't need to take as many shots or spend ages editing them.
@flagged that's my opinion. I'm not telling that the ones that edit aren't photographers or aren't good, I' saying just that is more difficult to take good pics that doesn't need edit.
For example, National Geographic only has pics that don't have any edit, and I can say you that sure because one year ago National Geographic emailes me asking me for a picture, I send them the original without sign and spend 3 months passing from one revisor to other searching if it was edited and how (or that's what the told me). The only editing that the NG accept is HDR shots (as mine), but not too much and only if appears real.
For that reason I prefer no editing shots, it is worth not editing.
Yes, I keep all my originals and work on duplicates. The photos I submit here are copies saved in a "365" directory, whether I've edited them or not. In a good 50% of cases there'll be a b&w version anyway.
Some competitions they run may have stricter rules, but those are the rules that govern most of the images they print. As you can see, that list allows most things short of cloning, image composition and silly filters.
If you want to take photos that aren't processed, then that's an admirable goal -- but don't kid yourself that's how the professionals work. Even photojournalism (which has very strict rules) typically allows colour correction, cropping, dodging and burning, etc., which are exactly the same things that film photographers were doing for well over a century before.
(It's also interesting that you consider HDR as being 'OK', given that it's by far and away the most invasive editing technique most people use).
@abirkill In HDR you mixed different EV, I said that was OK because NG told my that they accepto HDR, not because I think that it isn't editing.
If you read what you posted about "NG your shot" on first lines they encourage you to not modifi the shot, they want to see how the world is and not trough the tools of PS (literally said).
They won't buy any shot that have such a black edge, filters....as you said, just B&W, cropping or white balance (few more things).
I know that in the periodism world they manipulate so much the shots, always, but because they want to make better looking what they made, they dont worry about other things.
I repeat, I'm considering that a photographer that edit their shots is a bad photographer, just that I think that it's easier editing a shot to make better, than taking that shot well (great WB at the moment, exposure...etc etc etc).
Sorry if anyone had been ofended by my words, I didn't want that.
I always save my originals, because you never know - Photoshop might crash, or something might go wrong, and you'll lose the file. Or, you might edit something and then realise a year or two later that you've gotten much better at editing, and wish to have another shot at it.
I also backup my photos (originals and edits) on an external hard drive :)
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I'm currently at 652GB, which is not much compared to many prolific photographers. They're stored locally on a RAID array (an array of multiple hard disks that can survive a complete disk failure without losing any data) and also backed up remotely using CrashPlan (an online backup service).
Both your post-processing techniques, and the quality of software (for example, noise reduction) improve steadily as time passes, so it's definitely worth keeping your old images. I've had a few images added to stock photography sites that I took in 2006, and it's amazing how much better I can process them today than I could back in 2006! Without the original file, that wouldn't be possible. The same applies should you wish to exhibit your work in the future, or even just print it for your own use.
I'd look for a cheap external hard drive -- these are really easy to use, and just plug into a power socket and a USB port on your computer. A quick search online brings up this 1.5TB drive for $80 from Staples:
http://tinyurl.com/7qcndl8
That would be enough for many years of photographs for anyone but the most dedicated, even if you shoot in RAW and have a high-megapixel camera. (For example, about 75,000 RAW photos from my 50D, or 300,000 full-quality JPEGs).
There are probably better offers around, that was just the result of a 2 minute search.
Depending on how much you value your photographs, you may wish to consider getting two drives and storing the photos on both -- that would prevent you from losing your data should a drive fail, which can happen.
Alternatively you could store them on DVD, if your computer has a DVD writer built in (many do). If you do this, you should be aware that even DVDs can degrade over the course of several years (disc rot), so you should test that you can view a few photos off your discs every couple of years.
@loztsoul Trevor... i'd read that about the degradation of photos the more you copy them... but here's my question... let's say i take a photo and then i edit it to the way i like... i then copy the edited version to my 365 folder before uploading... is there a way of "moving" it rather than "copying" it to avoid this loss of data?
You will only lose data if you open the file in image editing software and then save it to another location, as this is effectively decompressing the image and recompressing it.
Note that if you use Windows versions earlier than Windows 7, the function built into Windows picture viewer to rotate an image (e.g. from portrait to landscape) also loses data, because it's also doing a decompress and recompress. Doing this in Windows 7 onwards is lossless.
I think that a good photographer is the one that is able to take a good shot and don't need to edit the capture. Anyone can take shit shot, take som PS, aply focus, remove noise, change curves....or aply a filter and...tachan!!! A fantastic shot.
But not everyone knows how to configure the parameters on the camera to make the shot good at the first time, managing contrast, EV, ISO, speed, f stop... So yes, I keep my originals. You can see in my Flickr account ( http://www.flickr.com/photos/petaqui ) that I put on the description if I edited the shot or not and what changes I made. Most of them don't have any editing process, some yes because I'm not a good photographer, but my challenge is to edit less pics day by day. So this project helps me, because I have to put atention on my mobile (I use my Nokia N8 to take the shots of my 365project) to take the better of it and take the best shot possible.
@boogie yep me too. They are stored in year folders, then months then days (slightly anal ;) )
@mittens I personally save all my photos, I have digital images that were taken years ago all stored away safely.
I used to give the resized ones descriptive names but now I give them the same number as the original plus a short name, e.g. n-006-cityscene, so that I know which original it came from and also which camera I used (N is for Nikon).
I'm working towards getting photos as right as I can in taking them so that I don't need to take as many shots or spend ages editing them.
For example, National Geographic only has pics that don't have any edit, and I can say you that sure because one year ago National Geographic emailes me asking me for a picture, I send them the original without sign and spend 3 months passing from one revisor to other searching if it was edited and how (or that's what the told me). The only editing that the NG accept is HDR shots (as mine), but not too much and only if appears real.
For that reason I prefer no editing shots, it is worth not editing.
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/your-shot/manipulation
Some competitions they run may have stricter rules, but those are the rules that govern most of the images they print. As you can see, that list allows most things short of cloning, image composition and silly filters.
It should also be noted that National Geographic are somewhat famous for being one of the first magazines to digitally manipulate their cover image (when they conveniently relocated a pyramid)
http://museumofhoaxes.com/hoax/photo_database/image/the_case_of_the_moving_pyramids/
If you want to take photos that aren't processed, then that's an admirable goal -- but don't kid yourself that's how the professionals work. Even photojournalism (which has very strict rules) typically allows colour correction, cropping, dodging and burning, etc., which are exactly the same things that film photographers were doing for well over a century before.
(It's also interesting that you consider HDR as being 'OK', given that it's by far and away the most invasive editing technique most people use).
If you read what you posted about "NG your shot" on first lines they encourage you to not modifi the shot, they want to see how the world is and not trough the tools of PS (literally said).
They won't buy any shot that have such a black edge, filters....as you said, just B&W, cropping or white balance (few more things).
I know that in the periodism world they manipulate so much the shots, always, but because they want to make better looking what they made, they dont worry about other things.
I repeat, I'm considering that a photographer that edit their shots is a bad photographer, just that I think that it's easier editing a shot to make better, than taking that shot well (great WB at the moment, exposure...etc etc etc).
Sorry if anyone had been ofended by my words, I didn't want that.
now I need to find the time to cule my files....
I also backup my photos (originals and edits) on an external hard drive :)