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Archive 2013 · Anyone else having trouble with "pack-ratism"? :)

  
 
charlesk
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p.1 #1 · p.1 #1 · Anyone else having trouble with "pack-ratism"? :)


When it comes to data, I hate to throw anything away. I like spares of backups, backups of spares, and anything I've worked on I want to keep "in case I need it in the future".

But I'm finding lately that it's making things unmanageable. I could just keep buying more hard drives, but at some point it gets hard to ensure backups are kept up to date, and so forth.

I have a set of photos that I first edited back in 2004. I just reedited them all, but I can't bring myself to delete the work files from 2004, even though I like the new versions much better and probably will never touch the old ones. Anyone else like this?

Does anyone combat this issue by trying to take advantage of the ability to "regenerate" things? For example, when I create a panorama, I save all the settings for it. With that settings file and the original TIFs, I can regenerate the raw unedited panorama, saving 100-500 MB in some cases by not keeping that TIF around. And I have the PSD so I probably wouldn't use the TIF again anyway. But again, it's hard to delete it.

Anyone here trust XMP files enough with Camera RAW to save only the original RAW/RAW+JPG and the PSD file and not an intermediate TIF?

Appreciate your thoughts.



Jan 29, 2013 at 06:28 PM
iweiner
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p.1 #2 · p.1 #2 · Anyone else having trouble with "pack-ratism"? :)


Charles, dont fuss about it!! Just create more images and enjoy.

Do label everything and keep a list of the 'stuff'!!

irv weiner



Jan 30, 2013 at 01:26 AM
Bifurcator
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p.1 #3 · p.1 #3 · Anyone else having trouble with "pack-ratism"? :)


charlesk wrote:
Anyone here trust XMP files enough with Camera RAW to save only the original RAW/RAW+JPG and the PSD file and not an intermediate TIF?

Appreciate your thoughts.



Intermediate TIFF? Never heard of that. Why? I keep RAW, JPG, PSD, and the XMP. Although I should probably not keep the PSD files at all unless there was some intensive PS work done on them.

And yeah, I keep a lot of old junk images like you too. My problem is laziness I think. It's such a hassle to sort for deletion - even during single session processing loads. At about $100 for 3TB now I just think my time is more valuable. If 3TB HDDs were $1,000 I'd sure be doing that tho! As for backups I [typically] only backup important images plus all images that have an PSD file of the same name. Everything else sits on the HDD and will move along as I buy bigger faster newer HDDs or whatever it will be. It's not so much though. In a little under 5 years I think it's been now, the data (all combined) is only 1TB. At that current rate I can go with my existing drives for another 84 years before I run out of space.

I think the back-up of "important" images is somewhere between 250 and 350GB only. Pretty soon that will probably fit on a single thumb-drive. What's the largest thumb-drive right now 256GB, or are we still at 128GB?

So anyway yeah, I'm a subscriber to your current philosophy of just getting another HDD when the current one is full-ish.




Feb 06, 2013 at 12:53 AM
Alan321
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p.1 #4 · p.1 #4 · Anyone else having trouble with "pack-ratism"? :)


It's not laziness unless you're also blessed with an abundance of spare time as well as your spare image files.

Intermediate tif files ? Sounds like a candidate for the trash bin. Why ? Because there isn't a single image file that I have from several years ago that doesn't convert at least as well and probably better on modern software than it did on old software, and because my knowledge and skill of conversion and editing is superior to what it was several years ago. By implication, the old .xmp files are junk too.

Chances are that anything you produced years ago can be done better today, so unless there was a huge amount of time involved or the image has special significance, you can afford to scrap the unnecessary files or at least downsize them to smaller files.


I guess you have more than one option. One is to save and archive files that you'll possible never look at again, and another is to keep them alive in your ever growing library so that with a program such as Lightroom you can always find them should you ever want to. Labels, ratings, keywords, collections, metadata and of course folder names can all be used to help manage your library without deleting images.


A greater problem, I think, is managing the many near-duplicates of good images. Delete them ? Edit them ? or just archive them as is ? I think I'll go for the archive option and rely on the good, edited images to point me to the near duplicates via metadata searches should the need arise.

- Alan



Feb 06, 2013 at 01:22 PM
Mike Pearson
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p.1 #5 · p.1 #5 · Anyone else having trouble with "pack-ratism"? :)


The only things I keep are the original RAW and the finished product.

There was a time I kept everything, but after a couple of years of never needing anything but the RAW (and that so rarely I have to wonder why I keep that) I ditched everything else. I do keep everything for a couple of months. If I want something different from the original finished product after a couple of months I guess I have to start over, but that has never happened. I'm generally on to the new pictures without a care for the old.

How do all those settings from CS 3 do under CS 5?



Feb 06, 2013 at 11:16 PM
Bifurcator
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p.1 #6 · p.1 #6 · Anyone else having trouble with "pack-ratism"? :)


Yeah, just in case someone cares I should clarify that the JPegs I keep are the small web posting files. So it's the same for me Mike... just the RAW and the Processed PSD (RAW and Finished) - tho RAW includes the sidecar. The Jpegs are kept only as a backup for the host (server) files.


Feb 07, 2013 at 05:10 PM





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