After having refreshed the image archive, there was just one more thing left: Revisit Texas. Long time readers might remember my disk space investigation one year ago, which led eventually to me buying my beloved little Synology DS 207+ NAS with 2 TB of disk space. Now, after having added those 5000 JPEGs to the disk, I was wondering how the disk space utilization came along, and whether I was threatened with another disk upgrade soon…
In case you are having the same thoughts, I have made the script I used to calculate that statistic available on the newly created download page at Alpenglow.info as freeware. I’m interested in feedback, so please give it a try and let me know if it works for you!
So here is the result of running the statistics script on my NAS:
Oh – positive suprise! The aggregated disk space curve actually flattens roughly mid-2009, despite my fears of faster image data growth after I had upgraded the camera to more Megapixels and Megabyte per image. What is the explanation? Well, it’s actually two:
- I did not have as much time for my hobby as I did before, and definitely did less photo shoots and excursions since then. I am inclined to change that again, and the next workshops are already booked
- I definitely improved my workflow: Instead of importing the JPEGs into Photoshop Album, keywording and assigning the 1-5 star rating in there (usually keeping even the 1 star images), I rather go through the images using the RAW viewer Nikon ViewNX first, and use the “1″ key (which assigns a red category marker) for those images that are definitely not worth keeping. After I have made one pass through the images, I immediately use the filter selector to select all red category images, and delete them from the disk. Phew!
Now the one real challenge is to flag as many images for deletion as possible. And I definitely got better at this, being more critical towards my own images and recognizing when images will not be suitable for presentation and thus don’t satisfy my own quality criteria (and have no nostalgical value yet ) – to say it with the words of Florian Möllers, a workshop leader I once had the pleasure to experience on a nature photography course in the Bavarian Forest national park (I think to remember that Florian himself was quoting the late Fritz Pölking – please make sure to pay Fritz’ website a visit, there is definitely a wealth of information about nature photography there):
Tapfer sein! (Be courageous!)
Which translates to: Delete those images! Get rid of them immediately! There will be better days, and better photos!
Photoblogs.com