Hello,
I have noticed that if I keep all digital negatives I run out of disk space regularly.
So I am thinking to keep RAW files for the best pictures only (3-5 star ratings in my case) and maybe for the pics I want to play with in future.
Do you think it is a good idea? I just don’t see a point keeping files I will hardly ever touch.
PS I am not a professional photographer so all the pictures I make are either family events or pictures of some soft of a hobby / DIY.
Not only do I keep them, but I back them up. I tend to delete maybe 2%.
Likewise, I also back up my RAW files. I only delete complete failures (such as blank frames). Once a year – or more often if I have been very busy – I transfer all my pix to an external hard drive.
Because I am also not a professional I do not feel it necessary to sing the mantra “off site, interstate, overseas”.
You will be surprised how many times you will trawl through your archives looking for a special pic. Or when you look at an image you did a couple of years ago you realise that your post production could have been so much better.
BTW, it helps to have a good database of all your shoots.
My $0.02,
Robert
I never delete. You can get 1TB external drives for $60. Always archive everything. And I do have two off site backups as well.
You guys are frightening me. @paperdigits Mica, what do you mean by “I never delete.” it is a sort of religious congregation, is your keyboard broken… are you making a greenhouse using hardrives as bricks? 
@rht, this is why I cannot make a decision. I always scroll through my old pics and the worst part is I keep finding pictures that I think were under rated back then.
As with the others, I tend to not delete things unless they really are a complete loss.
Storage is ridiculously cheap these days so there’s no reason not to keep everything from that perspective.
The place where it might be helpful to cull a little more might be organization or perusal. Even there it might not be so bad. Thought I tend to be a little more deliberate in my shooting, so I might not have near the volume of other folks…
@patdavid, I often come back home with 300 pics after having a casual evening walk. You know… trying to make that one perfect shot of my toddler or my dog. 
One of my file servers has 2TB and the other has 3TB, plus I have 3x 1TB and 3x 500GB externals. No shortage of storage over here!
I also don’t delete (even including photos from my phone) unless it’s:
All automatically backed up daily, but I haven’t gone to off-site with backups…yet.
Yep, I am right with you. However…
4TB HDD ≈ $110usd
or,
$0.0000275usd per MB
or for those 300 images of yours… (assuming 15MB files)
$1.86
@patdavid, having thousands of pictures how do you find that one you are thinking of? e.g. if there are 358 pictures found searching by “park”, “dog”, walking" and “sunset”. Also, no DAM software is fast. I have around 100 Gb of pictures at the moment and have tried many products including Lightroom, digikam, etc. and none of them worked fast with my collection.
This is a fantastic question that I don’t have a good answer for. 
I personally tend to have an idea of what I am looking for in terms of my own images/shoots. That is, I remember an image from a particular session with a particular model - so I can filter pretty quickly through my filesystem to get to the few directories that contain those images. From there it’s usually just focusing on the few images of the shoot that I might have had in mind (Dot, topless, sitting, single light source, rembrandt, gray sweater).
This is possible for me because my organization system is usually date + event in the filesystem, coupled with my (currently non-failing) memory. I do need a better system…
Hm, I’ve got approx. 1 TB of photos (little part of it are videos, and I keep sooc JPEGs as well, but should be at least > 500 GB raw photos) managed in darktable (approx. 25000 managed files) and darktable delivers the approx. 10000 photos tagged with my son’s name in an instant. Never felt that speed itself was an issue, only memory consumption, but at least for me this tends to get better with recent versions of the software.
I’m still confused the same… are we talking not deleting anything whatsoever comes out the sd/cf card or after culling?
That would be impossible for me regarding video, easy days with (2xcams) 256GB of data and projects with several TBs, having to work directly with SOC or proxies’ clips and trimming all possible fat previous to transcoding (pre-grade)… on the other hand and that applies to photo too, I find it very enriching the process of having to decide, to choose, to make picks. Personally I’ve learned a lot with it. I used to keep (after much deleting) around 10K pics a year… now it rarely surpasses 2000 and after some time I pop a beer and go to the main archive to delete quite a few more. Truth is (also due to that) I take much much less pictures and I’m happier with tresults… sometimes it almost feels like film-fun.
As an example, I went to the countryside visiting an artist and then see his last exhibition of large prints (that I’d developed). The remaining photos of 2 and a half days are about 20 or so. These days and after HDRs and panos are assembled I won’t normally even keep the raws. Maybe that may be seen as a photo-extremist, Alhah uak delete!
I’m not willing to predict what my brain may find interesting once it starts deteriorating!
@elGordo hilarious 
PS
All seems to point out tha digital era is gonna give birth to digital dementia and a massive diogenes syndrome outbrake 
@chris, “Fast” is the first word that comes to my mind if I am thinking about darktable but I never looked at it as a pictures/videos organizer. Maybe I should…
@patdavid, lucky you! My memory is pretty good too but the issue is I am not the only one taking pictures…
I don’t delete raw files and I only shoot raw. I might delete jpegs or xcfs or tiffs if I don’t like them.
With that much data you might look at a deduplicating file system like ZFS! Compression might help a little as well.
I don’t shoot video so I’m not in the know, although my Yi M1 does 4K… I guess I’ll have to give it a shot.
I never delete source though!
Culling is a pretty theoretical concept for me. It basically means marking the photos of my lens cap and these that are way out of focus as “ready to delete”. Of course not all of the out-of-focus ones, some of them may turn out as “real art” some day. Of course I am kidding regarding the last point. However, workflow-wise, that’s it, basically. Up to now, the hard drive industry kept pace with my demand and I never actually had to delete files. Luckily, there have always been some 100 GB of an unused disk image or something else that could be deleted.
I delete a lot of them. When I first look at my pictures, a good half goes to the bitbucket immediately for technical reasons (bad focus, motion blur…) (it’s a good half after a recent camera upgrade, before that it was a good there quarters). Several weeks later three quarters of the survivors are thrown away for lack of goodness… I don’t keep the raw files for these.
Then there are the shots I make when I’m shutter-happy: family gatherings, air shows, motorcycles races and various animals… and it’s even worse, because except for a few very good shots which I may very hypothetically try to improve by re-processing them from raw, I know the other ones will only be used as camera-produced JPEGs, so I mercilessly erase most of the raw files.