Hubby and I both shoot all our pics in RAW and I really like what we can do with them in Adobe but obviously have to save to jpeg to see them and print them. Is there any point saving the RAW file once we have converted to jpeg? At the moment my poor computer is about to fall over with the amount of space our pics are taking up :-) Thanks
I save all my RAW files to an external hard drive, just in case I ever want them. You can get 1 gig drives for about $70, and they are great for peace of mind.
Only if you want to go back to them later. Think of them like negatives, and the JPEG like prints. If you want to re-edit, b&w etc, it is better to work with the raw files. I keep all my raw files, and I have over 300000 of them.
Yup, as has been said, save if you think you'll ever need to tinker with again. External hard drives are dirt cheap, and so are internal ones. I'd recommend getting either two externals or one internal + one external, so you can keep a backup set on a separate physical drive, just in case. Every hard drive will fail eventually, and when they do they can be very expensive (and in some cases impossible) to get data off, so preparing by having two copies of anything you care about is a very smooth move.
@jinximages@eyebrows - 300000! Wowee, I thought I had enough at 60-thousand.... oooo weee. And yeah I have two external hard drives, one here at home and the other at a different location which I back up every now and then.
Also on this topic, if you're running Windows, Microsoft offer a free backup agent called SyncToy, which you can combine with the in-built Task Scheduler to automate the entire process of backing stuff up. Importantly, it does incrementals. Wahay!
if your pictures are worth saving you should definitely hang onto your raw files! You should also consider saving them to .dng format so you have archival confidence (see here). Personally, I always convert my raw files to dng on import in Lightroom. Also, make sure they are backed up, preferable in at least two locations. Hope this helps :)
Thanks all for your advice! I knew the people here would have some excellent ideas. We are off to get an external hard drive just for pics but I am also clearing out all the crap - so far about 20 g lol - this is the kind of spring cleaning I enjoy :-) also given me a chance to reorganize all of my picture files into categories instead by date- having a ball
Write a Reply
Sign up for a free account or Sign in to post a comment.
Tweets ahoy!
Join the Group
Pin With Me
Hubby and I both shoot all our pics in RAW and I really like what we can do with them in Adobe but obviously have to save to jpeg to see them and print them. Is there any point saving the RAW file once we have converted to jpeg? At the moment my poor computer is about to fall over with the amount of space our pics are taking up :-) Thanks