hi all, just wondering how long you keep your converted images (not raw files) before discarding them. i have just started shooting a lot of digital work and i am accumulating a lot of tiff files. do you guys keep them for a month to six weeks then discard them, then charge for reprocessing? if so how much do you charge in relation to your hourly rate.

I keep my processed files forever. And in the majority of cases with their layers. Yes, it is a big issue once you start getting thousands of images. My HDD and DVD collection is growing alarmingly fast. I don't trust either one.

I agree... I keep the original RAW and the final image with layers. My time is more valuable than a few dollars for more disk.

Kelly

Internal hard drives cost roughly $0.33 USD per GB while an external may be around $0.50 USD per GB (some more, some less depending on capacity and where you buy). Depending how much you shoot for a client, with redundancy you are looking at just a few dollars for each client.

Lets do an example of a portrait shoot with a few different poses:
I'm going to need to generalize for some numbers in this example, but will bias on the larger side of things:

Say you are shooting a 20D camera which gives you on average a 8mb raw file. Each file requiring edits goes to a 48-bit layered tiff file averaging say, 150mb (three full layers) each.

Now lets say you keep 40 frames for the client to choose from and they choose say, 15 to order prints from. Each needs to be converted to a layered tiff. That is 320MB in raw files and 2.2GB of tiffs. 2.57GB in hard drive space for one client. Just for kicks we'll say it's 3GB for misc. additional items (such as jpegs to send to a lab).

With single drive, it is $0.99 for that one client.
With RAID 1 (mirroring) system it is $1.98
With RAID 1 + a Backup it is $3.48

You'll have to calculate specifically for your situation of course but If you can't afford that type of minimal cost in storage, then I'd say you have much bigger problems in your business than hard drive space. Something else to ask yourself is how much did you spend storing negatives and other related items when shooting film?

I keep them until MS Sync Toy syncs them to oblivion. &#@$!!!!

Read the above response twice! Drive space is CHEAP nowadays -- about 50 cents per Gig. Even if your file gets huge with layers and takes up 2G, it costs nothing to store it relative to the time spent creating it...

thanks for the replies so far. as i said i have just started shooting digital, i rarely shot neg for my commercial work only tranny so that went straight to the designer/client. i have no issue spending on storage space after spening a fortune on a back. i use eyelike software which has parameters, which i set for each job. all my shots are done in camera and only really the curves are tweaked, i was just interested what the norm was that all.

It doesn't just breakdown to the cost per gig. Archiving has a lot more costs, and those can be quite high depending on how you do it. DVDs are not reliable and have to be reburned every couple of years, HHDs are also susceptible to failure with an almost certain loss of many gigs of images, so you need some kind of redundancy. And after several thousand DVDs or whatever media you use, you need to be able to locate an image fast enough and that is another headache. I hired someone just to keep my archive and catalog it using a database app. Now I can find an image in less than a minute. Whew! This I found to be one of the major problems when I transitioned from analog to digital capture. Film was a lot easier and cheaper to archive. Did I mention orphaned raw formats and DNG? Don't be late or you'll end up drowning in a myriad of images to archive in very little time.

You need to read "The DAM Book". It will explain all.

(DAM = digital asset management)

Speaking about archiving images, does anyone upload files to offsite storage? I have been thinking about this for my more important files to provide a third backup source. Would appreciate any info, recommendations etc. Thanks in advance for any help.

Depends what of course.

When I'm shooting landscape I keep the RAW files, the PSD with layers and the final TIFF for printing.

When I get back from my day job (wedding/event/portrait/commercial) photography I process and archieve the RAW files with the accompanying .XMP extensions including off site. However the duds, the ones that never made the proofs don't stay much longer than the order for the album, The client never saw them and it is rare, very rare that I would let a client see or browse the non proof quality files. I also don't keep the jpgs produced from those RAW files made for printing proofs longer than the album order, heck it's all done by standardised actions I've made, should I need them it won't take long to do.

I have a pretty simple rule, if it is files made from RAW using actions I don't keep them. If it is something that I have worked on and would take me more than a few minutes to do again then it is kept as a PSD file. Thankfully other than my landscape stuff there is relatively little of it.

Yup that is what I was getting at too. My time is in limited supply and more valuable to me than saving a few dollars and not having the appropriate backup strategy.

I keep every image. I delete ones that are junk, but hard drive space is too cheap not to.

RAID1 + tape backup. Tapes go down to a security deposit bag at my bank ever month or two. Tape drives are the most expensive component of that picture.