Hi Everyone,
I started offering photography services to my immediate circle for their art projects, modeling endeavors, etc. I am new to this starting only earlier this year.
The question I have for seasoned professionals and semi professionals is: do you keep ALL the photos you take of a given shoot? For example, I shot my friend, and we took maybe 500+ photos during the shoot. We sat down together another day and identified like 60 that she wants sent to her of that shoot (no edits, she’s doing that herself/outsourcing it).
The question is: what the heck do I do with the other 440 photos? I have like 15TB of space, so I can keep all the shots with no issue, but this surely isn’t sustainable forever. I come from an Engineering background where archiving files is the gospel (where I may need access to any given revision at any instant) but this might not be the case once my initial 60 “keepers” were identified and sent.
Thoughts and feedback?
Here’s my process. I actually don’t store anything on a physical hard drive. I use cloud backups.
After the shoot I cull and edit the gallery and deliver. Then I begin the backup process. I create a folder in my cloud storage. One is for raw files. The other is for edited and delivered files. Later, say maybe 6+ months later I feel comfortable deleting the raw folder, and just keep the edits indefinitely. I only deleted an edits folder from 2018 just now. I will likely never delete a wedding folder. You never know when you can be someone’s hero by having their wedding files.