How can I save space by creating an original copy of a final edit?

[vicfirth1]

Hi all!

It's quite simple by example (which is a real example)...

Say I went to a wedding two years ago. I took my camera and shot 1000 photos. Of those, I kept 50. I already deleted the other 950.

Of those 50, I edited 12 brilliant ones.

Now, I was going through old photos for leisure and for clean up. I don't need the originals. It's like my film editing - at the end of the day after 6 months I delete all original video for a client, but have a folder for all my final cuts and completed work.

So my questions is simple, I want to delete the original 12 brilliant raw files, but keep the edited versions, all touched up and everything.

Is there a simpler way to do this versus exporting 12 jpegs and reimporting them and deleting the original raw files?

Thank you in advance.

[Just Shoot Me]

I think deleting the original images is a Very Bad Idea. Just how big are they? 10-20-30-50-100 MBs each? Even at 100 MBs each that is only 1.2GBs in a world where 500 GBs drives are on the small size and 1-2-3 TB drives are the norm.

If you want to increase the free space on the internal drive of your computer copy/move them to an external drive but don't delete them.

[vicfirth1]

Hey Just Shoot Me!

I understand. As professionals, we rarely ever want to delete originals. I have Three external drives.

For my personal photos, in the age of digital photography (unlike back in the day with film) If I take a landscape photo and then edit it to my liking, that is the final work of art, so to speak. I have no use for the original. If a hard drive crashes, I'll have the "final" photo backed up. There's no reason for me to keep originals in this case.

[DdeGannes · Accepted solution]

Quote "If a hard drive crashes, I'll have the "final" photo backed up. There's no reason for me to keep originals in this case."

If the Original is the raw file data then there should be no "final" photo backed up. Raw processing software is still being improved on a continuous basis. Adobe has moved from Process version 2003 to Process version 2010 to Process version 2012 and will possibly release Process version 2017/2018. Surely if you revisit a raw file from 2003 with the latest version of ACR/LR you can produce a superior rendition purely due to the updated processing engine.

What if another software provider produced a superior raw processing application to the Adobe application that you now use?

[dj_paige]

Agreeing with https://forums.adobe.com/people/Just%20Shoot%20Me and DdeGannes, what you are proposing is a very poor practice. Furthermore, at least in my experience, I learn new editing techniques, and Lightroom is enhanced with new editing techniques, and when I look at my edits from 5 years ago, I find that I can edit those 5-year old photos to be better images than I created originally. And you can't do as good a job of editing if you have deleted the original. Lastly, any organizing you are doing in Lightroom requires the originals.

[vicfirth1]

Ok I'm sold.

Perhaps then, is there an easy way to do this regarding TIFF files which are huge, like 150 mb? They were created for my HDR photos when I'd export to Photomatix and back into lightroom. Or, to photoshop and back. I have no need for the TIFF. A Jpeg is fine.

The raw bracketed photos I will say y'all

Also, thank you for your responses. They bring up an additional question: I shoot canon, which is a .CR2 file. I've always kept them CR2, and not converted them to .DNG. I'm not familiar with the different, as I had learned way back a DNG is a "digital negative." But RAW files (in Canon's proprietary case, CR2) is a "digital negative, is it not?

If I've learned incorrectly please clarify and correct me! I welcome it.

[DdeGannes]

You can obtain details about DNG files at the link below.

DNG Pros, Cons and Myths | Photoshop Blog by Adobe