Honest answers -- how many pictures on your hard drive

  • Thread starter Thread starter Deleted member 68495
  • Start date Start date

How many pictures on your hard drive?

  • 0-4999

    Votes: 9 15.5%

  • 5000-19999

    Votes: 10 17.2%

  • 20000-49000

    Votes: 17 29.3%

  • 50000-100000

    Votes: 8 13.8%

  • Many more than 100, 000

    Votes: 14 24.1%
  • Total voters
    58
D

Deleted member 68495

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I probably don't have that many considering I have been doing photography for nearly 50 years but I am a harsh critic of my own work and have probably deleted 100 times the photographs I have kept. I have 16,482 images on my hard drive as of today. How many do you have? Just a curiosity thing.
 
I've stuck a guess at 5000 - 19999.

My first digital camera was around 2004 when my daughter was born. And probably 40-50% of my catalogue are RAW plus exported jpeg plus copies and blended images here and there. I don't take and keep a vast amount of images - I can go out on both weekend mornings and only take a dozen photos.
 
According to my Lightroom "catalog" I have 6472 pictures. The earliest digital was taken Christmas 2002 when I got my first digital camera, a Fujifilm Finepix F401 digital zoom, 2.1 MPix.

Included in the catalogue are about 100 scans of film images some taken 50 years ago. I do have a few drawers full of the original chemist processed prints, and I have kept the negatives. I try to remove any duplicates and am pretty self-critical of what's left.
 
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9431.

500 of those are pre 2006 which are all scans of filmy stuff. 2006 was the year I started taking photography 'seriously'. I'm a lot more judicious about what I keep these days, mainly because (film) I can rescan if necessary, and (digi) I can upload everything to Amazon, and then delete stuff from my HDD, so don't keep my hard drive cluttered with "maybe" images. It averages out to about 600/year.

I would imagine the number will be vastly different for pro vs non-pro too. I had 2 pieces of "work" this year and that added another 400 images which has almost doubled my total for 2021.
 
I don't know how to get the number from ACDSee. If anyone does please let me know as I would be intrigued to know now it has been mentioned.
 
63,413 according to "find . -type f | wc -l".

Plus another 20,000 or so negatives that haven't been scanned.

Using a computer on the train.JPG
 
Somewhat more than 100k jpg and about 50k RAW. I admire those that manage to cull, but knowing that my views change as to what is worth keeping, I save time and don't bother. Sometimes, it's nice to wander through archives, like strolling through a forgotten path in the forest, the technically poor images actually add to the ambience for me. It's not all about perfectionm, it's about remembering.
 
Lightroom has around 52,000 images, plus another 10,000 or so from before I started using it. I know there are also some orphaned raw files due to my current workflow.
 
Lez325 said:
Under 5,000 I only keep the best ones - no point keeping shoddy images :)

Les
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I'm moving more towards that approach. Sometimes it's good to revisit older images that had something but I couldn't draw it out at the time, only now with a different eye they can become something stronger.

I also keep holiday snaps in LR, and that probably accounts for nearly half the pictures.
 
ancient_mariner said:
I'm moving more towards that approach. Sometimes it's good to revisit older images that had something but I couldn't draw it out at the time, only now with a different eye they can become something stronger.

I also keep holiday snaps in LR, and that probably accounts for nearly half the pictures.
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Good morning Toni- I spent most of yesterday going through various image catalogues and deleting ones that did not come up to scratch, and let me say at this point, there were lots :LOL:
 
Which Hard Drive? :p
 
No idea but 8500 images on this iPad, not all are mine (family shares) and not all are photos in the usual sense.
 
Ham said:
Somewhat more than 100k jpg and about 50k RAW. I admire those that manage to cull, but knowing that my views change as to what is worth keeping, I save time and don't bother. Sometimes, it's nice to wander through archives, like strolling through a forgotten path in the forest, the technically poor images actually add to the ambience for me. It's not all about perfectionm, it's about remembering.
Click to expand...

I do keep technically inferior pictures for the same reason as you mention but I do go though each month's images and make sure there is only one of any subject from the same angle. I once accidentally left my camera on 'burst' mode and after a session found I had over a thousand pictures which had to be decimated.
 
Around 4,000. I don't keep photos I am never going to use - I have been known to spend the day photographing and end with just ten or so photos. Also, I have recently had a major cull and deleted several thousand photos that just weren't as good as I fooled myself into thinking they were.
 
john.margetts said:
I have two thick ring-binders of negatives. One day I shall scan them and decide to bin most of them.
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Yes, and I’ve got boxes & boxes of slides that’ll probably never see the light of day again.
 
I have 141,000 on my data hard drive but these are all image files so includes raw files, final TIFF files and a handful of JPEGs just retained temporarily. I have at least the same number backed up on my NAS plus around 100,000 archived older image files. The file count includes back ups and possibly sidecar file etc. The number that matters is the images in the LR catalogue and that is just over 50,000. I do still have lots of negatives and slides but all of the favourites were scanned many years ago. I do delete images I do not need or will not process normally just after a shoot. In my LR catalogue there are only 13600 which are considered to be suitable for processing and thus possible competition standard, However there is a similar number still retained which do not reach that standard but I wish to keep in case I have a future need.

Dave
 
I have a 12TB NAS drive, and I don’t really want to buy more storage - so now it only contains this years RAW files as I deleted the past few years to make room.

It’s not going to be enough now for a whole years shooting.
 
At a guess, 20000-50000 but that includes originals as well as "finished" files.
 
andrewc said:
On various hard drives, probably close to 1m. Only this week someone asked me if I had any photographs of a particular racing car at two events in 2013.
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And did you find them? My organisation system relies on knowing the year and preferably roughly the month something happened. I did try notating every photograph with tags but lost interest in that very quickly, far too much trouble. It's ok if it's a special event and all the pictures come from that but that's not generally the way I shoot pictures, it's usually some here, some there; not very organisable.
 
Keywords would be the easiest, but it could be done by date without too much trouble - since that would be known.
 
I have about 6,000 in Lightroom, but many more on my "archive", stored on NAS. Just done a check - 105,579!
 
ShinySideUp said:
And did you find them? My organisation system relies on knowing the year and preferably roughly the month something happened. I did try notating every photograph with tags but lost interest in that very quickly, far too much trouble. It's ok if it's a special event and all the pictures come from that but that's not generally the way I shoot pictures, it's usually some here, some there; not very organisable.
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I organise by year-month-event so as the customer was able to be specific it was easy. I keep copies of race results so can search those quickly
 
I have far too many and am lazy at sorting them which I keep promising myself I will do, I have a lot on an external drive but also too many on my laptops hard drive.
One question that i am sure a lot of people here can answer, Does just having them in LR or on your hard drive slow the performance of the machine down or do they need to be being accessed to affect the performance? The answer could give me the kick I need to cull loads!
 
Looks like I'm in a minority.

Ones I consider worth keeping go on flickr after processing. Everything else gets deleted. I currently have 3702 on flickr.
 
Fordsabroad said:
I have far too many and am lazy at sorting them which I keep promising myself I will do, I have a lot on an external drive but also too many on my laptops hard drive.
One question that i am sure a lot of people here can answer, Does just having them in LR or on your hard drive slow the performance of the machine down or do they need to be being accessed to affect the performance? The answer could give me the kick I need to cull loads!
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I'm afraid this is not something that will give you the kick you desire. Having photographic files on the hard drive affects the speed and performance of your computer not at all. People sometimes claim that a heavily fragmented drive will cause slowing problems but I've yet to notice it and is only likely to cause problems if your drive is quite full. You could try using a defragmenter if your hard drive(s) is quite full, it might make a difference but I doubt it. If you use an SSD then don't waste your time defragmenting as it will not make things any quicker (there is no mechanical movement going on so whether files are right next to each other or wide apart makes no difference) and may even slightly reduce the life of your SSD as they have a finite writing life. A lot of defragmenting is done because it looks nice on defrag programs.
 
simon ess said:
Looks like I'm in a minority.

Ones I consider worth keeping go on flickr after processing. Everything else gets deleted. I currently have 3702 on flickr.
Click to expand...

Sometimes though, a poor photograph that elicits a personal emotion is worth keeping over a technically perfect image that has no real connection to ones life and times. I have a lot of pictures that are a bit crap but if I got rid of them I'd have few pictures left of my kids, my dogs, my wife and my experiences. Sometimes I do wish I had the wherewithal to be more aggressive with my culling.
 
ShinySideUp said:
I'm afraid this is not something that will give you the kick you desire. Having photographic files on the hard drive affects the speed and performance of your computer not at all. People sometimes claim that a heavily fragmented drive will cause slowing problems but I've yet to notice it and is only likely to cause problems if your drive is quite full. You could try using a defragmenter if your hard drive(s) is quite full, it might make a difference but I doubt it. If you use an SSD then don't waste your time defragmenting as it will not make things any quicker (there is no mechanical movement going on so whether files are right next to each other or wide apart makes no difference) and may even slightly reduce the life of your SSD as they have a finite writing life. A lot of defragmenting is done because it looks nice on defrag programs.
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Thank you for your reply. It may not give me the kick I need but it is exactly the information I needed.
 
1,883 i am very picky with what i keep, id say i instantly reject 50% of what i import, that then gets whittled down even more as i start editing. This doesnt include photos i have on my phone either.
 
Probably about 100 which is the amount I took on my last outing .... I download the RAW files to the computer then format the card back in the camera.

I then process the files I want to keep, put the Jpegs on Flickr and delete the lot off my computer. If Flickr went belly up I would have nothing at all.
 
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