Category: Organization and Management

To Keep or To Delete – Are All Your Photos Worth Keeping?

Expertise, Interesting Stuff, Organization and Management, Photography, Tools

My last post was about printing your favourite photographs to put them on display in your home. In order to decide what are your favourite photographs though, you need to review your collection. That opens up a whole other topic and it’s one that has gotten some airtime lately – should you keep all the photographs you ever shoot or spend some time initially culling and sorting good from bad and deleting the bad?

The topic has surfaced because of the proliferation of online resources that now enable or even insist that you keep all of your “assets” in the cloud. The convenience of working on your collection anytime, anyplace, on any device seems to be what has prompted this discussion. Or perhaps it was the fact that even professional photographers now use many different devices to capture their work. And of course, the larger your collection, the more challenging is this idea of managing everything in the cloud. Cost aside, the larger the collection, the more organized you have to be in managing it and the more time you need to devote to it.

There are so many elements that factor into a decision on retention. This post explores some of the most relevant considerations for hobbyists primarily. Professionals have to be guided by contractual conditions and by their own marketing and branding interests. This is not that. This is for those of us who have full creative control over what we keep and what we don’t without the pressure of legal obligations or earning an income from it.

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You Are Offline!

Interesting Stuff, My Community, Organization and Management, Photography

Missed my regular post date a couple weeks ago. It’s been a crappy July so far. Long story short – I’m recovering from a non-Covid illness that floored me as much as Covid likely would. Just getting on my feet again. After close to three weeks.

And to top it off, the Internet provider I use had a massive country-wide outage recently that took everything down. Lasted only a day, but you realize exactly how dependent you are on them and on it when it is not there. That’s today’s piece: why are we so dependent?

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Backing Up is Hard to Do

Organization and Management, Photography, Tools

I’ve had conversations with photographer friends from time to time about the strategies they use to back up their files. In those conversations, we discuss camera cards, computers, hard drives and both connected and remote offsite storage. More on that in a bit.

But as we all know, computers are not the only way we capture our photographs now. In this age of mobile devices, many of us take pictures on our cellphones equally often and keep all of those images on our cellphones only. I discovered this when talking to customers in the camera store who come in looking to print their cellphone images for friends and family. Many don’t have data plans, so backup of these images is not generally something they consider and they are genuinely surprised when I casually ask.

Some cellphone operators provide an unlimited pseudo-storage service where a thumbnail sized version of the original image on the phone is always accessible in the cloud. These take up virtually no space but also can’t be downloaded and printed to share or put up on a wall. Great for social media only. If the phone dies or is somehow corrupted, the original images are gone forever.

To complicate this further, many of us now include video in our collections, again on the phone or through any of many other recording devices. Video has become a major element in my media collection now so it too requires some type of backup solution.

Over the course of the last couple of years, I’ve considered all of the sources of my media and have come up with options that I feel comfortable with. Likely overkill for most, but might be worth a read…

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