What’s a good long-term local storage strategy for a growing RAW photo library?
Asked 10/15/2015
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2 answers
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I’m an amateur photographer and want to keep my photos stored locally rather than in the cloud. I’ve been shooting RAW for about four years, and my library is now around 2 TB and growing quickly. I currently use a 4 TB WD My Cloud for storage and backup from my laptop, plus a 2 TB portable drive for transfers between workspaces. I organize everything in Lightroom.
As my collection grows, I’m trying to find the most efficient and economical way to manage space long-term. I’d prefer to keep files locally, and I also shoot a lot of timelapse sequences.
Would it make sense to:
- keep all RAW files and add more storage,
- convert some older or less important images to high-quality JPEG,
- delete obvious rejects, duplicates, and trial shots,
- use some kind of tiered/archive storage for less important work?
What’s the most practical approach for long-term local storage without making future editing or retrieval difficult?
Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
Photography Stack Exchange contributor
10y ago
2 Answers
2
As I think you realise, you've got three options:
- Reduce the number of photos you store (i.e. delete some photos)
- Reduce the size of each photo (i.e. convert from RAW to JPEG)
- Buy more storage
The balance between 1 and 2 can depend a lot on what sort of photography you're doing: the photojournalist's rule is "never delete a photo, because you never know when it might turn out to be interesting" - there are some famous stories about photos of Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky taken before the scandal broke. On the other hand, if you've got 10 shots of a baseball player during a swing where 1 of them has the ball on the bat and the other 9 don't, you're never going to do anything with those 9 shots.
Buying more storage obviously costs money, although you can consider "tiered storage" - have multiple copies of the better photos (e.g. on a RAID array) but only single copies of lower quality photos (e.g. on a single hard drive).
Originally by user11371. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
user11371
10y ago
0
Generated from our catalog & community — verify before relying on it.
You really have three practical choices: store fewer files, make files smaller, or buy more storage. In most cases, the best long-term approach is a mix of all three.
A sensible workflow is:
- keep RAW files for your best or important images,
- delete obvious rejects, blurry frames, duplicates, and unnecessary test shots,
- convert lower-priority images to high-quality JPEG if you don’t expect to re-edit them heavily,
- use a good photo manager so your archive stays searchable and organized.
Tiered storage can help: keep current and important work on your main storage, and move older or less important files to archive media. The community also suggested archiving less important images to DVD, though any archive is only useful if it’s organized and easy to find.
For timelapse work, where many frames are very similar, there may be extra savings from lossless compression of related image stacks, though that is a more advanced option.
In short: don’t convert everything to JPEG, and don’t keep every useless frame just because storage is finite. Cull aggressively, preserve RAW for your strongest work, and expand storage as needed.
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