For the first time ever, I’ve moved ALL of my photos into Lightroom (Okay maybe not all, but definitely most of them — 55,897 photos). When I first started photography I did all my editing in Photoshop and I was vehemently against Lightroom. I thought it was bulky and it didn’t let me do exactly what I wanted. Flash forward to today where I do 90% of my editing in Lightroom and have harnessed it’s capabilities for file organization and metadata.
I just got a shiny new 4TB external hard drive so I’m doing some digital “Spring Cleaning”. I’m combing through my previous external hard drives for duplicates and large files from either my freelance graphic design or photography. My plan is to move every image into Lightroom so I can get a better sense of what is in the 2TB of files that I have stored.
I have probably 12 years of archived photos in folders on my hard drive. Many of which I don’t intend to ever edit or use, but I can’t find it in me to delete them because “what if” I want them later. Some of them are blurry or out of focus but I choose to keep even some of the bad photos with the anticipation that as time progresses, so will technology along with the ability to fix some of those photos. Some of my earlier photos are merely sentimental. How necessary is it to keep everything? How do you decide what to keep?
My first step is to delete photos that are beyond repair. I don’t know why I am keeping those. My second step is to start deleting some of the nearly identical images. No sense in keeping both or all three of the same photo, right? The great thing about digital photography is that you can over-shoot as much as you want and delete later. I always shoot with that intention but most of the time I never delete the “duplicates”.
What about only keeping CR2 files and deleting JPGs as a way to save room? What happens if the CR2 file becomes obsolete in the future?
What are your thoughts on the topic(s)?