Learning to Let Go

It seems a weird post topic for a blog devoted to keeping old stuff up and running long past its best-by date, but one of the most important things I’ve learned recently is learning to let go of old stuff.

Not the cameras, mind you, but some of their files.

There was a time, back in my early digital photography days, when I’d archive everything in my picture folders. From back around 2008, when I was still shooting with the Nikon Coolpix 990, to well into my “serious camera” days, I’d get home from a day’s (or weekend’s) shooting and dump all the JPEGs…because I didn’t shoot RAW back then…into a folder like “2010-05-19 zoo trip with bobbi” or “2012-10-05 colorado trip”. It didn’t matter if the photos themselves were good, or bad, or an out of focus shot of the back of somebody’s head at the zoo, or an accidental snap of the high plains dirt in Colorado because I pressed the shutter release at the wrong time. If it was an image from that day, it got filed.

When a card got filled, I’d Sharpie the date and the camera it had been in on it and file it away.

Over time I learned to shoot RAW and would carefully comb through my images, pull out the good ones, and process them before filing the keepers in “2019-08-02 indiana state fair” or “2020-01-24 shot show”.

It wasn’t until recently, when I needed to get a very large capacity card ready for one of my high-res cameras that I hit upon a harsh truth.

The card that I needed to reformat (because I couldn’t afford to replace it and didn’t have time to do so, anyway) had pictures from an event over a year ago on it. The event itself doesn’t matter, what matters is that I’d already dredged through these RAW files a half dozen times and pulled out all the possible keepers, and even revisited it once or twice over ensuing months looking for unappreciated gems.

If I’d not come back to these RAW images again for more than a year…it was time to let them go and make room for the next batch of potential winners. The keepers had already been plucked out and double archived; it was time to let the rest go.

Why was this jpeg taking up hard drive space?