Wedding Photographers - Older Wedding Storage

[mr tommo]

I'd like to think that my wedding storage is pretty decent. We currently have every wedding: All RAW, JPEG Exports for albums designs, JPEG for CD/USB for clients since 2013.

Currently the 3 locations have the following:

Location 1:
NAS drive, auto backing up to a Desktop Harddrive, which in turn backs up to online cloud storage.

Location 2:
PC hard drive & desktop hard drive

Location 3:
desktop hard drive

Plus: 2x Portable hard drives with original Raw files only.

Sounds excessive but at least I'm confident we will have the images safe.


Anyway, it's now coming to the point where our storage is 2/3's full and will be full by the end of this year.
What do you guys do about your older weddings, surely there is no need for me to have all the Raws for weddings in 2013, where the bride & groom have their own CD of the final shots.
I'm unsure of the best way to trim it down though and for how long we need to keep things.

Would be good to hear how others do it.

 

[mr tommo]

Delete the RAWs for anything older than 2 years (not that you'll even need those, how often has a client come back and offered to pay you for a re-edit of a shot?), keep the final jpegs for the delivered set forever(ish) just in case a couple ever comes back having lost their copies so you can appear like an amazing genie and have them forever in your debt.

Loads of togs will now fly in and say they never delete RAWS etc etc but your just making a storage mountain for yourself, you've never committed to keeping all this stuff so liberate yourself and get shot of it!

That's exactly what I want to do, just seems daft to have 2,500 raws, plus the 500 Hi-res JPEGS when we've never heard from the couples since.
Eventually our NAS drives will be full and it just seems stupid to keep full a full NAS that will probably never be used again. Don't mind storing old hard drives as they are relatively cheap.

Do you advertise backups? It doesn't sound like it but I know a lot of wedding togs advertise lifetime backups.

Nope, we've only ever been asked once. We told them usually 6 months from the delivery of album/USB. They were more than happy with that as they only enquired in case distant relatives wanted to order a couple of months down the line. We tell them to back up the USB drive as soon as they get it.

 

[mr tommo]

Makes total sense, although our initial Lightroom organisation left a lot to be desired!

With current weddings we reject images straight away, the rest will make the cut after a couple of filter sessions. Is it best to delete RAWs from LR or export the chosen ones as RAWs?

 

[mr tommo]

I'm not saying it doesn't happen, but why would a drive fail just sat on a shelf?

Happened to us. Had a bank of 3 hard drives all sitting next to each other on the shelf, two died when powered up and were unrecoverable according to our IT guy. It wasn't weddings but work from 2008 that we didn't really need.

 

[mr tommo]

Interesting resposes btw.

It's prompted me to review how we choose our wedding images.

Tempted to have a 3 tier selection when reviewing images. Rejects, Rejects due to duplicate, chosen.

Then the Rejects will be focus, lighting, and other issues which will never see the light of day. These will be deleted.

Then hold on to the raws of the others for 6 months after presenting the wedding photos.

After 6 months, delete the duplicate rejects and lstore only the final RAW images along with the hi-res JPEGS they had on disk.