Hammy
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Upload & Sell: Off
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 p.1 #7 · How Long Do You Keep Files | |
I'll put a new spin on this...
Of course for personal stuff - forever.
For business stuff: 18 months.
But it would depend on what one does. Me, I shoot youth sports. I shoot over 1 million pix per season. Up to 250,000 in a single weekend. I can fill a TB drive every month easy. My main file servers has 12TB nearly full from the last 18 months, my web server has over 2 million photos online (but customers can find their images in as little as two clicks)
I tell my customers that I keep image for 12 months. And in that year, it works out pretty well: outside of right after an event, I get a spike of web orders at the end of the season, Christmas and right before the same show the next year.
I actually leave images online for 15 months to pick up any stragglers, and then take them off the web - keeping the master images for 18 months before actually DELETING them - giving 3 more months for people to "all of a sudden NEED the images".
But after 18 months, we've moved on - so have customers. I need more space for current (selling) images and customers don't look back for a 2 year old photo of their child.
I do keep all previously sold images - for reprint/loss replacement. This takes up only a tiny fraction of space for a season.
In the past 8 years, I've had one customer ask for replacement images of something they've previously ordered, and only 3 customers asking for something from more than 18 months back. From the current posts - only photolew has had a couple of REorders that this fulfills.
So I've lost potentially 3 orders. Lets say I do what most companies do and charge a $25 'recovery' fee, and then print costs on top of that: $10 for a 4x6 or something. Is $35 worth storing 5-6 million photos on several hard drives - to look up, find, and print one order every other year?
Yes, drives are cheap now - but they haven't always been. Not to mention, images are getting larger. So if I have to manage say a 1TB drive every month (two if I was smart to have a real backup), then I'd be looking at todays cost of $80 per drive (MUCH higher in the recent past). Needing about 8TB per season, that would be $640 per season (double that with a backup) - so potentially $2500 in storage to recover 1 file every other year to make $35.
That just doesn't make sense to me - no matter how proud I am of the images.
To me, its a matter of business. Fact 1: older images will sell considerably less over time. Fact 2: If they're not on the web for people to see, then people don't know you have them for sale.
So I kill them after 18 months. This saves me drive space, backup worries, filing issues - and when somebody calls for a 3 year old photo, I can confidently say that its gone - instead of spending days looking for the right hard drive that it's stored on.
Which raises a question for the rest of you event sports shooters (as a business) that keep your images: If they are not online and you don't advertise that you have them - WHY do you keep them?
Everybody has their reasons, nostalgia, pride, possible revenue, packrat... I'm just curious if its really worth it for something that will never be seen again.
If your a casual shooter or hobbiest, I can understand the wanting to keep images - although I think alot of us could really ask ourselves why?
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