As you can surmise from my previous post about digital cameras, we take lots of pictures. We got our first digital camera in Dec. 2002, and have gone through several since. And we've accumulated over 23,000 photos. And I can't throw any of them away. OK, I guess I can part with the odd blurry shot, or "oops I didn't realize the camera was on" picture of the sky or ground. Other than that, I keep'em all.
Part of my reasoning: you never know when you might want that picture of the yard before the deck was built, or that photo of the left-side of the van to see if that dent was there last April.
We capture about 2GB of photo data every month or so. That means our photo/video archive is a stack of DVDs that looks like this...
Maybe that's even healthy. The insanity becomes obvious when I tell you that I keep duplicates, one copy at home (hence the text "home copy" written on the DVDs), and one "remote copy" that I keep in my office at work.Oh, I can hear the sirens. They're coming to take me away!
I keep even the didn't realize the camera was on photos. With 1TB drives at < $100, I don't worry about keeping them all. Though with the new camera that puts out shots at ~5MB instead of ~1MB that the old one did, I may have to re-think that...
ReplyDeleteYou are right... what prompted the blog post was the acquisition of a 1TB external drive. I was dumping everything to the drive so we'd have online access to it (ie. no need to run and grab the DVD).
ReplyDeleteAs it turns out, we actually have over 28,000 photos, and about 3,700 videos. It was videos that was killing us... 30fps at 640x480 means that 1 minute of video was about 100MB. I've since scaled back the video resolution to 320x240.