How big is your ..errm.. photo library

[biggerry]

It would be interesting to gauge the size of peoples digital photography library (includes scanned film images as well I guess, basically if its a file on your computer it counts), I know mine has grown exponentially over the years and I am looking for ways to reduce the size of it - I unfortunately am a horder of files and rarely delete images unless they are really crap.

I think good management of your file farm and judicious culling is an important aspect especially in minimising backup sizes, do you often go back to a project/folder and cull images? Do you archive images

[surenj]

I unfortunately am a horder

You must learn to let go; Grasshopper.

I am brutal. Anything below 4 stars gets the chop. I have slowly started to do this on my archives. My collection is pretty small to begin with. Only about 20000 pics including scanned film.

[Remorhaz]

I have just under 18000 in my current Lightroom catalog - it's not all of my photos - I don't have any scanned images/film/etc - it is just the majority of my digital shots since 1998.

However yes it is growing exponentially (both in number of shots as well as raw size) since getting the D-SLR - e.g. since getting my D90 about 9 months ago my library has doubled in number of images and probably ten fold increase in raw storage.

[aim54x]

I have about 250gb worth of images from the last 3yrs......it would be a lot more but I didnt start shooting RAW until about 18months ago I think

[TonyT]

I have just over 20,000 images I am much harder on what I keep now some times I come across a old photo which I kept why I do not know. So I go through that set and delete the crap but I still have them on the other harddrive as I use two externals harddrives and copy to DVD's and my old harddrive which is full which is copied to the new harddrive .

[Murray Foote]

Mine adds up to 1.2TB which I didn't have time to record above while the poll was still open. (Correction, oh yes I can, but it opened at the results when I posted this first)

Another interesting question is - what's your largest image file?

With a quick look the largest I find is 2.4GB. That's a blended panorama from 5x4 scans. The largest digital image I found was 2.1GB, a blended HDR panorama.

[surenj]

With a quick look the largest I find is 2.4GB

I get annoyed when my PSD files go above 200mb!

[Murray Foote]

If you're processing a 5x4 or 6x17 scan, you're probably starting with something between 350MB and 500MB and if you went for full resolution with say an Imacon scanner (not that I ever have), it could start over 1TB.

Processing such files used to be a problem before Win7-64bit.

[Alpha_7]

At a guess mine is between 1-2TB, like someone above I'm a hoarder and up to recently, never deleted photos. Now I do a little bit of deleting, but I still keep more crap shots then I really should. I'm expecting my catalog to grow significantly with the up coming trip to South America and Antarctica.

[biggerry]

Another interesting question is - what's your largest image file?

With a quick look the largest I find is 2.4GB.

eeekk..

here's a thought, try CNX2 with that sized file, that'll sort ya out

[surenj]

Processing such files used to be a problem before Win7-64bit.

Grr. Now I feel I am under utilising Win764.

[Big Red]

i have about 1.8 Tb but thats about 5 1/2 years worth

[Murray Foote]

Processing such files used to be a problem before Win7-64bit.

Grr. Now I feel I am under utilising Win764.

Well, I'm sure everyone is underutilising Photoshop.

[DaveB]

There are so many ways to measure this. I saw the thread title and immediately thought in terms of numbers of images.

In terms of gigabytes mine is continually increasing (passed the 1TB mark ages ago) although the total number of images has been hovering around the 75,000 mark for a few months now. New photos come in, new photos get culled, old photos get culled too.
I set aside some time per month to cull old images, although the older JPEGs take hardly any space compared to the current RAWs. In fact my RAWs from 2001 (when I first experimented with RAW) are smaller than today's JPEGs! All the new files in the collection are big RAWs or bigger TIFFs. Actually the number went up recently as I imported all my video clips into LR3. Also I've quickly reworked a lot of old images (where in the old days I'd have to do a lot of work in Photoshop and store that in PSD/TIFF files) just using LR/ACR, and got what I think are better results. In doing so I've been able to cull a lot of TIFF files that weren't top-quality photos, but still keep them around in much smaller form.

Right now I have everything in one master LR catalog, but over the next few months I plan to transition to a multi-catalog organisation to be able to cope with all the work I've got lined up for 2010/2011. Generally when travelling I build up new catalogs, but they've all got merged into my master once I was back home.
In the meantime I'm taking advantage of the single catalog to clean up through the collection, develop my keyword list, etc. Maintaining a consistent keyword list becomes more of a challenge with multiple catalogs, so if I can get most of the keywording of "the old stuff" out of the way that will help. BTW, with previews that catalog takes up over 90GB, which does further skew the "how large is your library" question.

For me the number of images trickles along upwards during the year, but takes huge leaps when I'm travelling. For instance in January 2009 I came back from Argentina/Antarctica/Easter Island with ~13,000 images (a lot of additional crap was deleted during the trip) and ~330 GB of data. Today that's been whittled down to ~9,700 images, and I presume that after my next Antarctic trip in November I'll be brave enough to cull a lot more of them.
Hopefully I'll have them under control before I head back again in March!

Oh, and currently the largest TIFF in my library is 2GB (a huge panorama from Laos). The next-largest file is "only" 1GB, but there is a big cluster of files just below that.