I shoot sports for a local newspaper and shoot other stuff on my time off. Now that I am part time I am trying to catalog my images. I haven't even started on slides and print film yet, but have managed to catalog just over 5 million digital photos. I think I have a little over a million left to catalog. I kept all the sports photos I've taken that are in focus and have clear faces as you never know when one of them might make it to the pros, or something might happen that a photo of the individual will become important to someone. Have been a little more selective with other photos, but like you I have kept some reasoning that as software improves the photo may become better or more important.

Am saving money now to buy a couple of raids so that I can consolidate some of my portable hard drives. Will then leave the current hard drives in a shed on the acre we have and the duplicates on the raid, so if there is a disaster of some sort I have a better chance of not losing photos.

As long as they are cataloged so others can tell what the photos are when I'm gone why not. I also started shooting when I was six, but you are a little older, so good for you. Keep anything you want that provides memories.

I have always saved all my pictures. I got my first camera when I was 6 years old, that would have been in 1949. I have negatives and prints and slides from then until I quit shooting film in 2020. When I started shooting digital with a 6 MP Kodak pocket camera I continued that practice. Somewhere, on some disk I have the first digital picture I ever shot. Storage was not inexpensive in the early days but I knew it would be important to me later.

My hope was that someday post processing was going to allow me to salvage all those "I almost got it" shots that record important memories that I don't want to loose.

So here we are in 2023, storage is getting cheaper by the day. Post processing software is doing things we didn't even dream about 5 years ago. I now have over 38,000 uncatalogued images most of which I will never look at some of them I will. I will salvage them using all the improvements in Lightroom, Photoshop, Topaz and many others. I will use AI technology with no apology.

Late at night, all alone with a glass of 24 year old Laphroaig Scotch, I will cycle through that magic folder titled "Memories" and relive those earlier days.

I have always saved all my pictures. I got my first camera when I was 6 years old, that would have been in 1949. I have negatives and prints and slides from then until I quit shooting film in 2020. When I started shooting digital with a 6 MP Kodak pocket camera I continued that practice. Somewhere, on some disk I have the first digital picture I ever shot. Storage was not inexpensive in the early days but I knew it would be important to me later.

My hope was that someday post processing was going to allow me to salvage all those "I almost got it" shots that record important memories that I don't want to loose.

So here we are in 2023, storage is getting cheaper by the day. Post processing software is doing things we didn't even dream about 5 years ago. I now have over 38,000 uncatalogued images most of which I will never look at some of them I will. I will salvage them using all the improvements in Lightroom, Photoshop, Topaz and many others. I will use AI technology with no apology.

Late at night, all alone with a glass of 24 year old Laphroaig Scotch, I will cycle through that magic folder titled "Memories" and relive those earlier days.

I probably have 75% of all available 35mm negatives scanned to JPEG and imported to LR. As well as all my digital work. My LRCAT reports 99,041 images this evening. I thought to try a 'keeper rate' of just an assumed 90k digital, but I don't come up with logical estimates that correlate with camera shutter counts.

But, if I kept every image from just two of 6ish digitals over 15+ years, that's 250K+, all in RAW from these two bodies. Why buy more and storage to retain files in an alternative universe from my current, where those files were purged as trash immediately upon offloading?

I have always saved all my pictures. I got my first camera when I was 6 years old, that would have been in 1949. I have negatives and prints and slides from then until I quit shooting film in 2020. When I started shooting digital with a 6 MP Kodak pocket camera I continued that practice. Somewhere, on some disk I have the first digital picture I ever shot. Storage was not inexpensive in the early days but I knew it would be important to me later.

My hope was that someday post processing was going to allow me to salvage all those "I almost got it" shots that record important memories that I don't want to loose.

So here we are in 2023, storage is getting cheaper by the day. Post processing software is doing things we didn't even dream about 5 years ago. I now have over 38,000 uncatalogued images most of which I will never look at some of them I will. I will salvage them using all the improvements in Lightroom, Photoshop, Topaz and many others. I will use AI technology with no apology.

Late at night, all alone with a glass of 24 year old Laphroaig Scotch, I will cycle through that magic folder titled "Memories" and relive those earlier days.