Digtal Image Storage

Alright, I know you've either all been here, or are currently here now. My digital image library is getting horrendously big. I'm not even sure how many photo's I have, but it's probably 50k+. So there has now come a point where I'm asking myself two things:

FIRST: I just changed back from a MAC to a PC - this means that all the work I did in iPhoto for my personal photo's has been lost. This pisses me off to no end. Do you folks make permanent changes to your photos?

SECOND: What do you do with that many photo's? I'm thinking of a huge purge - looking at each one for a few seconds and deleting anything that doesn't grab me right away. Maybe not for travelling photo's, but really how many shots of flowers / my cat do I need? How do you all decide what to keep with storage is so cheap? I'm also pondering printing and then deleting the lot as I don't picture ever wanting to blow up more than a handful of shots.

This is along the lines raised when I asked Mike P if he kept his files or deleted.

Being old school, I keep everything. As you say, it's so cheap to do so. I never cut out individual neg's from a roll or strip to bin bad shots.

I don't delete digital either. Hard drives have expanded way more than memory cards, so storage is still the way to go for me.

All original images are stored. PP images are always saved separately.

Two large HDD have everything. One is a backup whilst the other is used. The back up is powered up once every few months. temporary back up is on two 500GB WD USB pocket drives.

It's down to the individual and how they feel about clutter etc.

As long as my filing references are up dated, I find images easily.

Regards

Organisation of photos starts with transferring the originals in an orderly fashion.

My hard drive structure runs like this:

K20D 088 MB&B Canal 24 06 10
K20D 089 Sally Christening 25 06 2010

and so on. These are the original JPEG images and are never altered. They don't take up much space per image and can happily be stored and archived. They can be found easily.

EPZ 2010-06
EPZ 2010-07

are finished files for ePHOTOzine. Again easily found and taking up even less space as each one is 200K-400K maximum.

Once you are disciplined in filing then the rest is no problem. If you want files in order within a folder, then number them 001, 002, 003 etc. They will stay in order.

As you have a weealth of images stored, why not just leave them there. You don't necessarily have to do anything. If you do something drastic with that Delete command you might regret it later.

Do you still have the Mac? If so export the photos from iPhoto!

If not, do you have a Time Machine backup and a friendly Mac owner?

Did you have an Intel Mac, if so why not just install Windows on it instead of replacing it? Then you could have the best of both worlds!

I do still have the mac - brilliant idea re export! I think I'll do that this weekend!