What do you do with your old photos?

Posted by Philip in Follow-up, Photo Philosophy

This question comes up a lot and with my recent backup array issue, it came up again.  In most cases your older photos aren’t the most spectacular photos you ever produced.  I dare say 90-95% of them you could easily label as garbage… but they are your garbage.  A couple of months ago some of Ansel Adams’ early negatives were found at a garage sale and have been reported to be worth over 200 million.  I doubt that’s truly the case since a lot of Ansel’s magic was in the darkroom creating the print.  It’s his early work, and wasn’t worth anything to him while he was alive, but it’s worth something to someone else now.  The same holds true for your photos, they will be worth something to someone in the future.

I know how devastating it is to lose a lot of photos, with a previous girlfriend going psycho on me and selling my camera equipment and burning all my photos and negatives.  So I have little to show from my film days.  This has made me paranoid in the digital age so I have backups of backups.

A little perspective

As a casual photographer in the earlier years of digital.  My Olympus cameras D360 and D40 spanned 7 years of usage.  In that time I produced 12,488 photos for a whopping total of 11GB worth of space with those cameras.  I had gotten a DSLR a while before they were retired, but I still used them for family and fun photos since they were convenient. Now, when I do a day of shooting I often produce 12-20GB of images.  Yes it’s much fewer files that are much larger, but if you look at it from an image mass point of view, 11GB is not a lot.

Organization

A long time ago I decided to store all my photos by date.  So today’s folder would be 20100902.  I do have several folders I put these in, so any work for my business goes in it’s own folder, artistic photography, family, and specialty projects all have their own top level folders so I can easily find them without the need for an image management program. I’ll also append a name or description of the folder so it’s not just a date but a date and a name.  This way if the new image manipulation killer app comes out tomorrow, I can easily add my library with little fear.

I know it’s now time for me to embarrass myself.  Since I posted my first digital photo, I’ll post a photo from my last day of shooting with my Olympus D40.   It happened to be at the circus.

Whatever happened to those cameras?  My Son and daughter got ahold of them and continued to use them for about 2 more years before they go so inoperable the became the subject of “I wonder what’s inside of one of these things” dismantling experiments.  Now my 4-year-old son uses my first DSLR.

Bottom line

There’s no real reason not to keep old photos.  I dare say in a couple of years you’ll be able to easily carry around your entire photo library, much like I can easily carry around my 7 years of using those two Olympus point and shot camera photos on 16GB flash drive with room to spare.