Do you delete your CR2s?

[John_SD]

What do you all do with your CR2s after you've worked them, applied edits and so forth and finally created your JPGs that you're satisfied with? For all practical purposes, let's say that you are done with your CR2 files. I've been keeping my CR2 files after I work them, thinking that in the future, I may want to rework them, but they take up a lot of space. I have been sorely tempted to start deleting those CR2s that I feel confident I am done with, which would free up a lot of space. Do you delete yours?

[RobertTheFat]

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@John_SD wrote:

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@ebiggs1 wrote:

"The space the CR2s take is irrelevant. The last time I bought an 8TB hard drive, it cost about $200."

This has been my philosophy.  However lately I have questioned myself if it is rational?   6 drives now!  Close to 400,000 photos (just the last 17 years).  Who will ever go through them or even want to?  The ones that are relevant to me or my family are already out and into their hands.  My clients already have their media whether a print or digital file. I am getting closer to pulling the plug on those drives. I used to guarantee photos for 6 months.  Perhaps after the 6 month date they all get the file 13 treatment.

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Your reasoning is wise and sound, IMO. As a longtime pro with many clients, you likely had legitimate business reasons to retain those RAW files and whatnot over the years. But as you clearly observe, perhaps now a reasonable "expiration date" of 6 months would serve to eliminate those images that have long since served their purpose. 

As a mere amateur and enthusiast I have no such reason to retain hundreds of thousands of images, ever. I love photography, but I am my own worst critic, and even though I delete early and often, I am stil surprised at how much space my existing CR2s take up. I do not want to reach a point of becomming a hoarder like some of the guys. That is a serious condition that requires professional care. Thus, I am going thru my CR2s manually and deleting those that have been converted to my satisfaction. That approach works for me. 

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We're starting to conflate two indepndent issues here: whether to save CR2s at all and how ruthlessly we should cull them if we do. I'm fine with getting rid of crappy pictures, duplicates, pictures that have outlived their usefulness, etc. But for any picture I really like, I would be willing to delete the JPEG (if I'm not using it as a screen background or something), but never the CR2. You can always regenerate the JPEG; you can't regenerate the CR2.

[ebiggs1]

"...you can't regenerate the CR2."

Robert,

I think you are glossing over one major factor here.  It may not be a factor to you or most amateurs. Perhaps not even advanced amateurs but it does to people like me that shoot a lot or shoot for a living.  I mean shoot A LOT of photos. A 100 is not a lot, a 1000 is not a lot and 10,000 is not a lot even 100,000 is a lot.  If I manage another few years I will top 1/2 million pictures. That is just since I retired!  The sheer number makes it the more important factor.  Who will want them?  Who will go through them to see if they want them? I suspect the answer is nobody.  The folks that did want them already have them.

You know I love LR but the need for external HD's cause LR to slow down when you are dealing with 10,000's of files.  Cache size has to be increased, too. Neither is very difficult to over come buy just another reason why lots and lots of old cr2's is questionable. I haven't done it ye but my hand is close to pulling the plug!

[RobertTheFat]

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@ebiggs1 wrote:

"...you can't regenerate the CR2."

Robert,

I think you are glossing over one major factor here.  It may not be a factor to you or most amateurs. Perhaps not even advanced amateurs but it does to people like me that shoot a lot or shoot for a living.  I mean shoot A LOT of photos. A 100 is not a lot, a 1000 is not a lot and 10,000 is not a lot even 100,000 is a lot.  If I manage another few years I will top 1/2 million pictures. That is just since I retired!  The sheer number makes it the more important factor.  Who will want them?  Who will go through them to see if they want them? I suspect the answer is nobody.  The folks that did want them already have them.

You know I love LR but the need for external HD's cause LR to slow down when you are dealing with 10,000's of files.  Cache size has to be increased, too. Neither is very difficult to over come buy just another reason why lots and lots of old cr2's is questionable. I haven't done it ye but my hand is close to pulling the plug!

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Please don't misconstrue what I said, Ernie. I'm not opposed to culling CR2s. If you have pictures that are no longer of any use, it makes perfect sense to throw them out. What I'm saying is that if you're going to save a picture, it should be the CR2 file rather than the JPEG. John was, I believe, proposing to save only the JPEGs, because they're smaller. My take is that that's a bad idea because the information that was lost in the conversion to JPEG will be missed if you ever want to edit the pictures a different way. Unless you have a huge collection of indispensable pictures, the size difference shouldn't be a factor.

[ebiggs1]

No, Robert I understand thoroughly.  I am guiltily. I save and have saved everything.  I just keep adding drives.  The sheer amount of files is what is now a determining factor, however.  Most of you will not have that problem.  After a short period of time perhaps a month or two I can't ever remember going back to an old cr2 file and re-editing it.  My guarantee to clients is 6 months. Upon occasion people have asked for a print or replacement after the 6 months and LR has kept the edited file ready fro that purpose.  If the cr2 were to be gone I would lose that ability for sure but the edits done in LR stand. Not the cr2.

Last year a former bride came to me and explained they moved to a new house in a new city.  She said somehow her wedding photos were lost.   Can I, or could I replace them?  I did that wedding in 2010.  Well keeping the files as my habit is, of course, I had them and I made a former bride very happy again. No charge! That is rare but there is merit in keeping cr2's. But 99.9% of what I have nobody will ever want them. Nobody will want to spend the time going through them to see if they want any.  They already have what they want.

The school took this one.  Keep or delete?  

[TCampbell]

I do cull the bad images... (as Peter says).  I use Lightroom and I use the builtin rating system to do a quick pass to flag rejects and those get deleted.  

Lightroom offers a 5-star rating system so you can think of this as a letter grade.  Everything stars with a "3" (like giving every student a C average grade) and those that are a little better get promoted to 4.  Those that I think are a bit marginal (but not bad enough to delete) get demoted to a 2.

I then filter to only focus on the 4's... get an idea of which have the most potential and start tweaking... and my favorites ultimately get promoted to a 5.  

Just occasionally something I previously wasn't nuts about (a 3 ... or possibly even a 2) I'll re-consider and realize I could do something with those images ... but that's rare.  But if I have a lot of pictures from an event... I might blow away the 1's ... and maybe even the 2's.  In my personal definition the 1's and 2's have nothing technically wrong (if they had something technically wrong they'd have been marked as rejects and blown away).  They're just not very likeable images for other reasons.  If these were movies, they'd be the sections of film that ended up on the "cutting room floor".

My flow for action photography is a bit different different because here you can "burst" through a whole bunch of frames of the same thing.  In that case the burst usually has a favorite frame out of the burst series and I might actually delete the ones that weren't the "pick" ... even though there was really nothing wrong with them (they just weren't the favorite).  

Of every image that I consider good enough to keep... the CR2's never get deleted.