Most delete local copies?

Techmate

Newb here. I uploaded all my photos. Wondering if I really need a local copy on my HD. Most delete their local copies once uploaded to smugmug?

darryl

Techmate wrote:

Newb here. I uploaded all my photos. Wondering if I really need a local copy on my HD. Most delete their local copies once uploaded to smugmug?

No way.

Two hard drives store all my photos. One at work, one at home.

As unlikely as it seems, SmugMug may not be around forever, all of Amazon's datacenters may go up in flames simultaneously, the Internet could be shutdown. :-}

But seriously -- go buy some hard drives. They're cheap. And when you need to work on a bunch of old images locally, it'll be way faster than downloading them over the net.

jfriend

Techmate wrote:

Newb here. I uploaded all my photos. Wondering if I really need a local copy on my HD. Most delete their local copies once uploaded to smugmug?

Like Daryl, I keep local copies on at least two hard drives, even for stuff I've uploaded to Smugmug. It all really depends upon how much you want to safeguard your images and how easily you want to be able to search through them locally. I think of my images as things that I cannot replace.

Hard drives of medium capacity are around 13 cents / GB. If a typical JPEG image for a 12MP camera is 3-5MB, that means you can store 15-20 images for a penny or 1500-2000 for a buck. Considering what I pay for the equipment to take these pictures and the time I put into it, I'm more than happy to pay a few bucks to save them locally.

hyachts

Just piling on here - I keep all of my images on all three of my computers, a home server, and an online backup solution in addition to SmugMug. What I do to free up space, though, is after all of my photos are on SmugMug (I use an Eye-Fi card, so this happens automatically) I go through them locally and cull all the losers. That way if I get rid of one that I end up wanting for some reason it's at least on Smugmug (and a copy on my online backup for at least 90 days) and I free up all the space that junk pics would otherwise occupy locally.