Your digital file size total

[Mike Hollingshead]

Each time I go through and delete picture files, I wonder what other people have for file size and/or image counts. Just raw/original images, not processed large TIFFs or anything.

I'm pretty much the opposite of a hoarder. Give me enough time and I won't have any images from a few years back. I'll just keep going back over past years of images and finding something I can delete. It's getting scary actually lol. Just can't stand having too many images/files to keep track of.

From what I can tell, since 2002 I've shot right around 50,000 images. I never ever bracket and I'm generally never shooting sporty type things where you fire several off you won't need later. I just shoot pretty frequently, though really never pile on the files/images each outing.

Of those 50,000 or so, I'm down to around 2,000. This is in 106 folders/outings. Thing is I've stacked some outings/dates into other folders. I also have a folder for various for each year. So the outings/dates is probably something more like 200. Which well would be down to keeping about 10 per deal/outing lol.

Total raw/original file size total is now right at 20 gigs. This from clear back to 2002. Averages out to 2.5 gigs a year lol. 04, 05, and 06 are just a smidge over 1.0 gig each.

Anyway, post your "stats" if you want. I'm sure people will find it interesting what people have or don't have. I'm just wondering how large that gets for some of you out there that shoot a lot that I doubt have a big deleting problem like I probably do. I don't learn either as someone will want to buy/license an image off my site and I'll be like, yeah, I deleted that. Then they'd pick something else and same thing, yeah I deleted that one too.

 

[CZandbergen]

168GB, 90,945 Images. I don't bracket, and that is all images, RAW and JPEG and includes dups from post production, etc. Most of it is not weather related though...

 

[Martin Kucera]

Hey Mike, I remember you mentioning how you became a fan of deleting images, this was a while back. I guess as we all move forward and get new, more exciting images, the old ones become sort of uninteresting. I find this especially true with lightning photography, as I manage to capture better and closer shots, the old ones quickly become boring. I keep some for sentimental value, just to remember some notable chases... also now, with an all digital camcorder, its nice to just click on an icon and delete the clip instantly.

 

[cedwards]

25,465 images 63GB. I have started deleting some, but haven't gotten very far with that.

 

[James Hammett]

Interesting question - here are my stats:

JPG (2004-2007) - 3,188 3.94GB
RAW (2008-2009) - 3,426 31.21GB

The RAWs include only a handful of bracketed images. My signal/noise ratio is no doubt poor given my bad habit of dumping images off my camera and not ever doing anything with them. 1TB of RAID-1 will do that to a person.

H - whenever you get the urge to delete an image, you wanna just sign it over to me instead?

 

[Wesley Luginbyhl]

My photos folder is now up to 96.5 GB with 42,884 files in 312 folders with mostly jpegs. Of that storm chasing is only 36 GB, but I didnt get a digital camera till 2007.

 

[Greg Campbell]

Somewhat over 200GB and about 3500 images.

Most of this is claimed by digitized 35mm slides, which pop out of the scanner at 138MB each. 10~36 keepers per box and I've got maybe 150 boxes. I do reduce the bit depth and/or resolution of the numerous not-crap-but-less-than-stellar pictures.

I've scanned a few dozen 6x6 Medium Format transparencies. At 4K dpi and 48 bit, they chew 450MB each! A sharp slide produces jaw dropping detail.

The drebel DSLR is used mostly for lightning. Since the vast majority of my twilight images are 'misses,' the many thousands of machine-gunned raw files have long since been pared down to a few dozen keepers. (I often have several TIF versions of the same images in various stages of tweakage. At ~50MB each, the duplicates add up.) Recently I've been experimenting with astrophotography and various 'stacking' programs. You can blaze off a few hundred 1~2 second unguided exposures and then let the computer squish them all together in an overnight run. If this new hobby takes off, I may wind up keeping some of the better RAW sequences.

Add a gig or two so for all my P/S digicam photos. Vacations, events, etc.

 

[Steve Miller]

56GB / 24,697 Images
I delete images but not as religiously as Mike. I wish I could.
I do my deleting during post and once I'm finished working with a specific date, I do not make changes within that folder again.
I have only started bracketing recently as I play with HDR.

 

[Ryan McGinnis]

Hmm. Not sure how many are dupes (some are going to be toned TIFF versions of RAW images), but I'm showing around 87,000 images taking up around 500GB. That's not counting the boxes and boxes of slides and negs, which I need to finish going through and scanning the keepers.

 

[Dan Robinson]

I have a bad habit of not deleting images before archiving a memory card offload. Consequently my still image data has surpassed my video archives, including all of my hd archives. I'm paranoid about mass erasing images for fear that I'll most likely lose a few good ones in the process. The way that hard drive capacities are getting bigger and cheaper means that its becoming less of an issue for me over time.

 

[Mike Hollingshead]

Recently I've been experimenting with astrophotography and various 'stacking' programs. You can blaze off a few hundred 1~2 second unguided exposures and then let the computer squish them all together in an overnight run. If this new hobby takes off, I may wind up keeping some of the better RAW sequences.

I guess that reminds me of something I didn't count/figure in. At times I'd do something similar, trying to get evening or even "day" bolts, stop down, set to consecutive shooting, lock the cable release in on 1-2 second exposures. I would then sit there and delete away on the LCD after/during that outing. Then all the other times I'd delete away on the LCD too. When I dump to the pc the computer adds the image file number as they go onto the pc. So all those that get deleted never make it into any numbering system. So I could likely double the 50k shots taken deal I guess.

Wonder if there is anywhere in the camera info it keeps a tally on shots taken. Sort of like some LCD tv's/monitors keep an hour on number.

Interesting numbers so far! I already want to go back through and find more to delete. I'm pretty damn thinned out, but could probably be content getting down to 1500 or so.

Back to the star trails thing. I have those too, but went ahead and stacked the images/raws into one TIFF file. I then deleted all the files it took to make it. Only real drawback to that would be if you ever wanted to make a movie file of the moving stars. I was like screw it, wanted to delete too badly lol. The only one like that I kept all the images for a movie/TL was the Aurora twilight sup shots this year. Took some willpower to not delete the less interesting ones for the sake of a possible movie/gif need later.

 

[Mike Deep]

Wonder if there is anywhere in the camera info it keeps a tally on shots taken. Sort of like some LCD tv's/monitors keep an hour on number.

Mike - You may find this program useful: http://astrojargon.net/EOSInfo.aspx

 

[Jason Foster]

I'm not sure how many digital stuff I have. I don't have all of it centralized. Some is in an 'archive' HDD, while others are just in the computer drive and back-up drive. To guess, I would say it's around 100-200gb of original photos total.

I've likely taken 50,000 photos, but it could be way higher. I know I've rolled a few cameras over in the IMG_XXXX.XXX file sequence quite a few times. But for me, keep in mind I've used the camera to not only take good photos of storms and other weather related images but also tons of the following:

- pets, family, friends, parties, etc.
- for sale items on ebay or other online sales
- while chasing, place markers and street signs to remind me of where I was
- scale model cars, both ones I assemble and paint and some I've purchased (metal bodied)
- trains, full size and model trains
- bad parking jobs
- bad or aggressive drivers
- always take pictures of geocaches I've found. Usually 5 per cache (the cache hidden, the container, me holding the container, the gps with coordinates shown, and maybe one other)
- home renovation projects (before and after)
- work photos (building surveys, detail, before and after both interior and exterior) for my architecture job.
- architecture trips and tours
- randomly found architecture that I like
- I even take pictures of signs for stuff for sale that has a phone number, so I don't have to write it down.
- and more, but you guys get the picture (pardon the pun)

I tend to like to take panoramic photos of a full 360° view and stitch them together, and 50% of the time those individual pictures are shot in the vertical format, so it can take me up to 30 photos to get the full view without too much adjustments.

Bottomline, I'm very liberal when it comes to taking photos in most cases. In certain situations I tend to leave the rapid fire setting on and sometimes I'll unintentionally rattle three photos off at once even though I don't bracket (I hardly ever bracket). On top of that I've got tons of copies of those photos reduced for the web, or just processed for color correction, etc. That also doesn't include all the prints I've scanned in and I still have a couple thousand yet to be scanned (if I scan them all). I figure the storage is cheap, and I know I won't do much with them, ever, but they are there if I want them.

And this doesn't count all the video!!! Oh dear god!

 

[Dan Robinson]

I just got back to my desk, here are my photo folder stats: 290GB, 46,474 files

That goes back to 2000.

SD stock video folder: 131GB, 276 files
HD stock video folder: 189GB, 1,229 files

So video's actually still ahead, but won't be sometime next year, at least at this rate. Video is actually easier to trim down for archiving anyway.

I really should go through everything one-by one and delete the junk, but to be honest, it's probably worth my time to just keep buying bigger hard drives every 2 years like I have been. Easier to be a file packrat...

 

[Stephen Locke]

Well I have a rule; If I never delete an image I will never accidently* delete an image. Terabyte hard-drives are so cheap these days why delete anything? I don't feel reducing the number of images by deleting will make cataloging more manageable. Any method of cataloging needs to account for a ton of images. I'm at several TB with back ups.

*I shot a tornado on the Texas/New Mexico border on 8-18 and accidentally deleted those images the following day. That was on a camera card and was the first and last time I'll make that boneheaded move.