RAW: Keep or Delete?

[Daniel Browning]

Hi! Any RAW shooters here?

Lots of us. []

After post processing your RAW files, do you
still keep it or throw it away from a said amount of time? (1 year or
so?)

GAH! Throw away raw files!? I don't know the meaning of them horrible words.

should I delete those more than a year ago?

Absolutely not. If it's not illegal to throw them away, then it should be. []

I'm
afraid it'll consume a lot of space in the near future.

You're kidding, right? 1.5 TB hard drives cost $110 now. If your raw files are 15 MB, that means you can store 100,000 photos on a single disk. That's less than one tenth of one cent for every raw file.


Now, if you were talking about video, I might understand. I can shoot one or two terabytes of video in a single day, so I have to have piles and piles of hard drives. But still photos? They're a drop in the bucket.

Why keep it when you won't update your shot again? (Or do you?).

There are so many reasons, I'm not sure I have time to go into them all. Here's one example: the color range of the displays and printers of today are smaller than they will be in the future. For example, if you save your JPEG in sRGB today, then buy an AdobeRGB monitor in the future, you will miss out on a lot of the colors you could have seen from a new raw conversion.


More importantly, your raw processing skill and software will advance in the future, and you may want to redo some of the photos.

Additionally, are you going to keep the edited RAW setting, or the "as
shot" RAW settings?

I keep the edited raw settings. The "as shot" settings will already be stored in the raw file.