Your average annual disk space / storage rate of growth ?

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JWest

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I am now at just my 6th month point of being into "wildlife" photography. I have found that with NO culling at all, I'm at a rate of 8 TB per year mostly using a Nikon Z9 or same size Canon R52. There is some Canon 24 Mp R1 and 20Mp 1Dx3 as well as some 20 Mp Nikon D6. But I'm betting that my ratio will be 74% are the 45Mp bodies.

FWIW, I do NOT really use high speed shutter, hardly ever. In part this is due to just so many years of shooting only as fast as my finger will go but also truly not wanting to deal with 10,000 images the night of an afternoon out. I am thoroughly annoyed when it's even 4500 or so. In fact I was almost happy to find recently on a 4500 outing over a few hours that the first half where I';d been shooting across too much warm mud that none of them would be good due to that atmospheric degradation. So I just jumped about 2200 ahead to when I had moved to a better spot shooting mostly over water vs that warmed mud.

However, if I could user that program that someone mentioned that helps automatically with the out of focus stuff, then I could see using maybe 10-20 fps for when things are moving more or action is happening. Currently I do have kind of a sweet spot shutter speed setting for me which is "low speed shutter" but set to 3-5 which means that a quick dab of the finger results in a single shot while holding down gets you the chosen 3 to 5. Above 5 I find it's harder to get just one frame. At 3 it's easy. Oh, and on Canon to utilize raw "pre-capture", you have to have shutter set to at least low speed but then you can back that down to the 3-5 zone and kind of have the best of both, if your goal like mine is to minimize massive capture counts.

For "culling" I would first do a wave to remove the inevitable out of focus shots at the very least, and then a wave of all the "face turned away" shots, and the "meh" shots. I imagine, having gone through to process my selects, that culling of just those would result in a 75% or higher reduction, which would put my archive down to just 2TB annually, which is much more manageable.

I am having to rethink this whole thing because for 22 years, I only shot what I needed for my commercial architectural work, and then I of course archived all the raws as there were only the ones needed for the multiple exposures for layering a manual "hdr" image plus any extras for things like people walking here and there, a cloud over here, and blending twilight with post sunset and pre sunset, or shifted frames for stitching.

All of those are archived but its still really not that many compared to just a few hours with an active pond and birds scene.

Then, my archive structure was always RAW only on one drive and the produced images which were PSD and tiffs on different drives, then both of those redundantly backed up, the "work" drive space ended up being nearly the same used size as the RAW drive. This made archive structuring and HDD buying very easy to plan.

Now though, the RAW drive space archive is huge compared to the "produced" images work drive because the produced image is from one single shot, not 5-7 layers for exposure, plus 5-7 more for a shifted stitching situation, and not the 5-8 more image layers for the various add-on items, then all the "adjustment layers" all in PS resulting in files too big for basic TIFF and requiring that master file to be a PSD archived, then lfattened to the 16 bit tiff, then an 8 bit tiff for the client and of course level 10 full size jpegs for other buyers.

Now it's just manipulations in LRC and we're done, one tiff at 16 bit, save an 8 but at downsized 2500 pixels to show off on here, and the space needed is next to nothing.

Now, who was it that mentioned that "out of focus" sorting/filtering/easy to see, culling software program ????

Was it @DRwyoming or was it @NorthernFocus ?

Sort of separately, I wonder if other people are like me, using an NVME drive on a pcie card as their "working" space, then having all of that nightly backed up to a couple HDD using Carbon Copy Cloner - which is what I've been doing for many years. I basically have 4 locations of any chosen image. The first raw, a backup drive of all those raw (both of those also are backups of either Capture one settings or LRC), then the produced images are also on their own NVME drive but then backed up to a larger HDD. Periodically both of those are also backed up externally but all of these drives are set up so that they could simply be removed and plugged into any new computer for access if something happened to a motherboard or OS which is all separate.
 
I’ve trashed only bad shots before this yer (drive space is cheap) and have about 7ish TB going back to the early 2000s. 2024 was about 2TB as I did Serengeti and Costa Rica and I expect another TB or so for Botswana this year. I don’t get out as much as I used to and for frequently visited places I delete a lot more…no sense in keeping 300 almost identical GBH shots.
 
When I upgraded from a Nikon D500 to a Z9 in May of last year, it took about two months for me to realize something had to change.

During my 6 years with the D500, I was accumulating new data at 10 25MB files per second (250MB/second) when pressing the shutter release. The Z9 acquires data at 20 50MB files (1GB) per second.

I'd been averaging about 15K new images per year while working full-time and getting out a few days each week. After retiring in December 2024, I'd been getting out more frequently, staying out longer and was on track to blow up my storage system.

Working in LrC, my practice for many years has been to store current year photos on my laptop's internal drive with those images and all prior years stored externally (mirrored in dual 8TB drives) and in the cloud (Backblaze).

At the rate I was acquiring new data, I was on track to fill everything by the end of the year.

This led to a major revision in how I approach culling. My practice had been to save every image that was in good focus and reasonably well framed. The Big change I made was to save roughly 3 examples from each good sequence with a subject.

For example, Sunday morning I had a good session with two pronghorn does and their four young fawns. I came home with almost 2,900 images...5x as many as I typically shoot. The 2,900 could be divided into 4 events:
  • Fawns running around with the zoomies
  • Fawns with mom
  • Fawns scampering though the tall grass toward me
  • Fawns bedded down in the grass waiting for mom to return
Within each event, there are multiple sequences defined by interactions with other fawns or mom, or by individual actions/body positions. I target selecting 3 critically focused images with good composition from each sequence.

Last night I deleted about 2,600 of the 2,900 photos. That leaves about 300, fun which I'll process 20-30. A more typical outcome is 50-100 photos with 5-10 getting processed.

While the number of photos I'm saving from a shoot is reduced exponentially, I don't think I'm missing out on anything. Rather than saving 30 good images from a burst, I'm saving 3. The 30 would have included redundant body positions and positions that aren't particularly pleasing. The 3 are all images I think have good potential.

Last November, I took advantage of the Black Friday deals to upgrade my laptop. I've increased the internal SSD storage from 500GB to 2TB, giving me a lot more capacity. I should have more than enough capacity for this year's photos.

I made a project of going back through my photo archive, last winter, and applying my new culling strategy to all prior years. It took about a week. The external drives are at about 50% capacity so, there's lots of room for growth.
 
Since moving to 47-48mp cameras, my annual average is about 500GB. I am brutal in culling as I shoot but I do shoot a lot. Photos imported to Mac Drive then moved after culling to external drive plus backup,
 
Last night I deleted about 2,600 of the 2,900 photos. That leaves about 300, fun which I'll process 20-30. A more typical outcome is 50-100 photos with 5-10 getting processed.

While the number of photos I'm saving from a shoot is reduced exponentially, I don't think I'm missing out on anything. Rather than saving 30 good images from a burst, I'm saving 3. The 30 would have included redundant body positions and positions that aren't particularly pleasing. The 3 are all images I think have good potential.
Bill, your statistics match my own quite well. Also, in winter months when I’m not shooting nearly as much, I cull the prior 12 months photos even more aggressively. I keep a few I’d normally delete (slight OOF, obstructed subjects, poorly exposed, noisy) for testing with improved editing tools over time.
 
When I upgraded from a Nikon D500 to a Z9 in May of last year, it took about two months for me to realize something had to change.

During my 6 years with the D500, I was accumulating new data at 10 25MB files per second (250MB/second) when pressing the shutter release. The Z9 acquires data at 20 50MB files (1GB) per second.

I'd been averaging about 15K new images per year while working full-time and getting out a few days each week. After retiring in December 2024, I'd been getting out more frequently, staying out longer and was on track to blow up my storage system.

Working in LrC, my practice for many years has been to store current year photos on my laptop's internal drive with those images and all prior years stored externally (mirrored in dual 8TB drives) and in the cloud (Backblaze).

At the rate I was acquiring new data, I was on track to fill everything by the end of the year.

This led to a major revision in how I approach culling. My practice had been to save every image that was in good focus and reasonably well framed. The Big change I made was to save roughly 3 examples from each good sequence with a subject.

For example, Sunday morning I had a good session with two pronghorn does and their four young fawns. I came home with almost 2,900 images...5x as many as I typically shoot. The 2,900 could be divided into 4 events:
  • Fawns running around with the zoomies
  • Fawns with mom
  • Fawns scampering though the tall grass toward me
  • Fawns bedded down in the grass waiting for mom to return
Within each event, there are multiple sequences defined by interactions with other fawns or mom, or by individual actions/body positions. I target selecting 3 critically focused images with good composition from each sequence.

Last night I deleted about 2,600 of the 2,900 photos. That leaves about 300, fun which I'll process 20-30. A more typical outcome is 50-100 photos with 5-10 getting processed.

While the number of photos I'm saving from a shoot is reduced exponentially, I don't think I'm missing out on anything. Rather than saving 30 good images from a burst, I'm saving 3. The 30 would have included redundant body positions and positions that aren't particularly pleasing. The 3 are all images I think have good potential.

Last November, I took advantage of the Black Friday deals to upgrade my laptop. I've increased the internal SSD storage from 500GB to 2TB, giving me a lot more capacity. I should have more than enough capacity for this year's photos.

I made a project of going back through my photo archive, last winter, and applying my new culling strategy to all prior years. It took about a week. The external drives are at about 50% capacity so, there's lots of room for growth.
Yeah, I think I'm going to have to get deep into the culling weeds. Thank you for all the detail on your path through this!
 
Bill, your statistics match my own quite well. Also, in winter months when I’m not shooting nearly as much, I cull the prior 12 months photos even more aggressively. I keep a few I’d normally delete (slight OOF, obstructed subjects, poorly exposed, noisy) for testing with improved editing tools over time.
I think I will do something like this too because sometimes when we revisit an image, like a year later, we see something differently in terms of compositions or some other aesthetic when there may be several technically good images of various poses.
 
Rather than saving 30 good images from a burst, I'm saving 3.
This is what I'm TRYING to do, and not so successfully with the rarest of animals that I may never see again, especially when it's a burst where I remember well. However, like you, I have started to delete the body positions/frames that I would not hang on my wall. It destroys the sequence of course, but saves space over time. Decisions decisions.
 
I think I will do something like this too because sometimes when we revisit an image, like a year later, we see something differently in terms of compositions or some other aesthetic when there may be several technically good images of various poses.
In autumn 2020 I got a nice shot of a Mockingbird in a tree outside my home office window. The light was heavily green tinted by the tree leaves and the bird had nudged itself against a newly sprouted branch. Back then I couldn't effectively remove the branch sprout and nothing I tried could resolve the green tint. I come back to the raw image every year and my edits get better as PS/LR have offered better tools.
 
This is what I'm TRYING to do, and not so successfully with the rarest of animals that I may never see again, especially when it's a burst where I remember well. However, like you, I have started to delete the body positions/frames that I would not hang on my wall. It destroys the sequence of course, but saves space over time. Decisions decisions.
For that scenario, I would be saving the whole burst because it's like a brief story. Drive space isn't terribly expensive so I think a broader culling would be plenty.

For example, right now a Western Digital Black nvme blade 8TB is about $620 and you can get high end pcie cards for that from $250/4 slots - $950/8 slots from OWC. I have enterprise grade HDD with tech called "Optinand" by Western Digital model HC570 22TB which was only a few hundred $usd. I have two of those as mirrored backup drives for all raw and work files.
 
In autumn 2020 I got a nice shot of a Mockingbird in a tree outside my home office window. The light was heavily green tinted by the tree leaves and the bird had nudged itself against a newly sprouted branch. Back then I couldn't remove the branch sprout and nothing I tried could resolve the green tint. I come back to the raw image every year and my edits get better as PS/LR have offered better tools.
That's awesome, and it actually reminds me of dealing with film. Scanners got better and better but now something that LOL just occurred to me this moment is I wonder if you could run a scan of film through some of these newly incredible noise reduction processes and get something better than before.
 
This statement of yours rings true for me as well:
"FWIW, I do NOT really use high speed shutter, hardly ever. In part this is due to just so many years of shooting only as fast as my finger will go but also truly not wanting to deal with 10,000 images the night of an afternoon out. I am thoroughly annoyed when it's even 4500 or so."

Unless a bird is in flight or an animal is moving rapidly I shoot single frames.
In addition, my fast burst rate is only 5 fps.

I do not want to dread going through thousands of images and deleting 90%+ of those taken during just one morning of shooting.
Even so, I have at least 500 images to go through after an average morning, of which so many are so similar that it is agonizing to decide what to keep/delete.
 
FRV has been a game changer for me, along with not sweating what to keep. As mentioned in my thread the Edge and Detail selection when used with their shortcuts and the scroll wheel properly set up its like watching a movie and honing in on the most sharp ones. I can get through 10,000 images in 20 min to a first cull down to 200 or fewer images depending on the sequences. I did a thread on FRV. With that in mind all the disk growth and storage worries go away.
 
FRV has been a game changer for me, along with not sweating what to keep. As mentioned in my thread the Edge and Detail selection when used with their shortcuts and the scroll wheel properly set up its like watching a movie and honing in on the most sharp ones. I can get through 10,000 images in 20 min to a first cull down to 200 or fewer images depending on the sequences. I did a thread on FRV. With that in mind all the disk growth and storage worries go away.
So it was probably one of your posts where I first saw it mentioned. How do I find that thread so as to not rehash it here? (found it)
 
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I'm up to about 500GB-1TB per year, but I do cull my images down a bit. I am sure I could cull more, but I just need to find the time. I use the Samsung 2TB SSD hard drives.
 
I am now at just my 6th month point of being into "wildlife" photography. I have found that with NO culling at all, I'm at a rate of 8 TB per year mostly using a Nikon Z9 or same size Canon R52. There is some Canon 24 Mp R1 and 20Mp 1Dx3 as well as some 20 Mp Nikon D6. But I'm betting that my ratio will be 74% are the 45Mp bodies.

FWIW, I do NOT really use high speed shutter, hardly ever. In part this is due to just so many years of shooting only as fast as my finger will go but also truly not wanting to deal with 10,000 images the night of an afternoon out. I am thoroughly annoyed when it's even 4500 or so. In fact I was almost happy to find recently on a 4500 outing over a few hours that the first half where I';d been shooting across too much warm mud that none of them would be good due to that atmospheric degradation. So I just jumped about 2200 ahead to when I had moved to a better spot shooting mostly over water vs that warmed mud.

However, if I could user that program that someone mentioned that helps automatically with the out of focus stuff, then I could see using maybe 10-20 fps for when things are moving more or action is happening. Currently I do have kind of a sweet spot shutter speed setting for me which is "low speed shutter" but set to 3-5 which means that a quick dab of the finger results in a single shot while holding down gets you the chosen 3 to 5. Above 5 I find it's harder to get just one frame. At 3 it's easy. Oh, and on Canon to utilize raw "pre-capture", you have to have shutter set to at least low speed but then you can back that down to the 3-5 zone and kind of have the best of both, if your goal like mine is to minimize massive capture counts.

For "culling" I would first do a wave to remove the inevitable out of focus shots at the very least, and then a wave of all the "face turned away" shots, and the "meh" shots. I imagine, having gone through to process my selects, that culling of just those would result in a 75% or higher reduction, which would put my archive down to just 2TB annually, which is much more manageable.

I am having to rethink this whole thing because for 22 years, I only shot what I needed for my commercial architectural work, and then I of course archived all the raws as there were only the ones needed for the multiple exposures for layering a manual "hdr" image plus any extras for things like people walking here and there, a cloud over here, and blending twilight with post sunset and pre sunset, or shifted frames for stitching.

All of those are archived but its still really not that many compared to just a few hours with an active pond and birds scene.

Then, my archive structure was always RAW only on one drive and the produced images which were PSD and tiffs on different drives, then both of those redundantly backed up, the "work" drive space ended up being nearly the same used size as the RAW drive. This made archive structuring and HDD buying very easy to plan.

Now though, the RAW drive space archive is huge compared to the "produced" images work drive because the produced image is from one single shot, not 5-7 layers for exposure, plus 5-7 more for a shifted stitching situation, and not the 5-8 more image layers for the various add-on items, then all the "adjustment layers" all in PS resulting in files too big for basic TIFF and requiring that master file to be a PSD archived, then lfattened to the 16 bit tiff, then an 8 bit tiff for the client and of course level 10 full size jpegs for other buyers.

Now it's just manipulations in LRC and we're done, one tiff at 16 bit, save an 8 but at downsized 2500 pixels to show off on here, and the space needed is next to nothing.

Now, who was it that mentioned that "out of focus" sorting/filtering/easy to see, culling software program ????

Was it @DRwyoming or was it @NorthernFocus ?

Sort of separately, I wonder if other people are like me, using an NVME drive on a pcie card as their "working" space, then having all of that nightly backed up to a couple HDD using Carbon Copy Cloner - which is what I've been doing for many years. I basically have 4 locations of any chosen image. The first raw, a backup drive of all those raw (both of those also are backups of either Capture one settings or LRC), then the produced images are also on their own NVME drive but then backed up to a larger HDD. Periodically both of those are also backed up externally but all of these drives are set up so that they could simply be removed and plugged into any new computer for access if something happened to a motherboard or OS which is all separate.
Wasn't me.
 
So it was probably one of your posts where I first saw it mentioned. How do I find that thread so as to not rehash it here? (found it)
Sorry I had run out of time. Glad you found it. The key is setting up your mouse scroll wheel to flip through the images and when you find a sequence you like you use the E and D key to see which are sharpest of the compositions you like.

I mark mine with 4 stars and those are the ones that at the end get transferred via right click to a folder I have called "To LRC". I use this method to say organized. I might do multiple imports from that folder for one shoot in order to add different keywords.
 
My rate of growth has slowed significantly over the years. I attribute that to a few reasons:
1) I’m more critical of my photos. I only keep the good ones and how I define “good one” has evolved too.
2) for many species, I operate on a replacement method or a uniqueness method. If I get a shot of a species that is better than ones I have kept in the past, I will look over those and keep the better new one and remove the old one. Uniqueness is all about unique location, unique behavior, first time seeing something, etc.
3) special memories. I will keep some photos that represent special memories even if the photo is not that high of a quality, the memory makes up for it

I cull my images in 3 stages:
1) off the card. Ones that are obviously not going to be keepers I delete from the card before importing them. Not only to preserve disk space but also because every minute of our lives is a precious gift, I don’t want to spend any of that time editing or taking a second look at a photo that I will never like anyway.
2) after importing and going through edits, I will cull out sequences. When I have multiple images from the same burst, I will pick out the best one(s) and delete the rest (exception may be if the sequence tells a story like an osprey diving or an act of predation). In those ”except” cases I will take closer look to see which images tell the story and which are extra. Extra gets removed.
3) every year, in Janurary, I go through the prior year’s images and delete any that I haven’t edited in a year, I have taken better photos of the same species or scene, even the ”why did I keep that one” shots. I do it in January because where I live, January is usually cold, dark, cloudy and a monotone gray resulting in a very limited desire to step outside. I deleted about 18,000 images in Jan 2025.

My rate of growth depends on the year but a reasonable average is about 5,000 to 8,000 images a year. On an average, that would be about 360+/- GB per year.
 
My first hard drive had a capacity of 5MB and cost more than $5,000. I can now buy a 10GB drive for less than $300. Periodically I replace the drives in my two NAS boxes with higher capacity ones and that costs less than $1000 to provide for another 2-3 years of file storage.

I learned when culling to do so quickly and if an image did not look immediately like a "keeper" I delete it. This is easy to do with wildlife images with so many relative duplicates. As my wife and I start to shoot more videos the culling process is a lot more complicated and a lot more time consuming.
 
My first hard drive had a capacity of 5MB and cost more than $5,000. I can now buy a 10GB drive for less than $300. Periodically I replace the drives in my two NAS boxes with higher capacity ones and that costs less than $1000 to provide for another 2-3 years of file storage.

I learned when culling to do so quickly and if an image did not look immediately like a "keeper" I delete it. This is easy to do with wildlife images with so many relative duplicates. As my wife and I start to shoot more videos the culling process is a lot more complicated and a lot more time consuming.
My first HDD was probably around 1998 and SCSI. Surely you don't mean now you'd buy a "10GB" drive for $300, TB ?
 
I had a bit of a shock too going from DSLR D3s files to Z9, and even Z6ii files too. My usual average keeper rate After intense culling in the past overall was say dance recital performance and rehearsal, 15,000 images on D3S, half were keeper quality say, but after hard culling, I would keep only 300-400 for client perm on my storage . But I would process properly top 150-300 so is that a 2% High end keeper rate for event.

Wildlife, I can image 1500 at 20 frames per second, whittle down to 10% first pass, pick 10-15 unless a special moment or scene. And that is where the storage starts to hit. Those multi burst special moments. BRUTAL storage! I I am thankful, that I am no longer imaging events, now that I am shooting mirrorless.

I am planning very soon, 4 multi 8 TB drives just for images. My current Print folder (meaning top top) is around 5000-6000 images since digital in 2002, 500,000 images taken based upon all my bodies shutter count, I have around 30,000 images stored from events, and last event shot was 2014, and 2019.
 
For your fun, my last big session was the 2024 eclipse, and I did not use high frames per second, but a manual release, with a cable, but every click of shutter I was taking and storing 10 images with a wide shutter bracketing exposure range. I was pressing that button every second or so. I had 1000 different exposures in just the shooting prior to start of totality, during, and a bit after. Culling, I culled down to a top 800-900, and I did not process any. I have 61 images on my web page. These were jpg large fine files. I used to never shoot jpg and raw, but with the Z9, I now do so, and save the raw processing for the wall hangar images if needed. For the eclipse I went for it and just imaged jpg.

 
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