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Photo Collection Size

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Adam Tow

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Quick question to all the readers of this website. How large is your photo collection? 1GB, 5GB, 25GB, or greater? I was talking to a colleague of mine and our estimates differed greatly. I guessed most people have between 25-40GB of photos. He figured that the vast majority of people have less than 5GB of photos. Regardless of the correct figure, that number is just going to increase as time goes by.

As for me, I’m currently at 313GB for all of my photos from 1998 to today!

Use the comments field to let us know how large your photo collection is!

22 responses to “Photo Collection Size”

  1. jim Avatar
    jim

    Goodness. Looks as though I have 211 MB, I’m ashamed to say. But I don’t take too many pictures these days. I mostly just download what you and Eric post on the web. ;)

    The last camera I owned was a Cannon film camera, before I accidentally ran over it with my car about 6 years ago. My question would be how many photo albums do people have these days, as in analog print photo albums? I’ve got 4 I think, stored away in a box somewhere. And I’ve got a bunch of packs of photos in various places that were never placed in albums.

    Reply
  2. Eric Cheng Avatar
    Eric Cheng

    517GB. Getting out of control!!

    Reply
  3. DaHamster Avatar
    DaHamster

    I have over 800 GB and my wife is about to kill me. : |

    Reply
  4. Paul Avatar
    Paul

    I don’t have my collection here with me (it outgrew my PowerBook drive size), but I bet it’s close to 60 GB.

    Reply
  5. keith Avatar
    keith

    I’ve somewhere between 250GB and 400GB, but b/c of really messy backup schemes some of that is duplicates that I haven’t sorted out.

    I find the biggest problem with backing up is that it’s not intelligent enough. Say you rename a whole folder full of images. You’d have to run a journaling file system or else your system will think the old ones were all deleted and new ones created. That’s both a speed problem and an understandability problem.

    Any suggestions ?

    Reply
  6. Sherman Ting Avatar
    Sherman Ting

    I have about 62GB since my first digital camera Canon S100 in 8/2000. I’ve kept them on an Infrant X6 and am still looking for a good backup mechanism.

    Reply
  7. vann knight Avatar
    vann knight

    I’ve got about 100GB and growing.

    Reply
  8. Monty Avatar
    Monty

    since purchase of my first digital camera (fuji finepix 3800) in dec of 2002 to my 20D (purchased feb 05) I am at about 60gig of pics.
    i use an external drive for storage, but find backing things up a real chore. hate to lose anything, but also hate multiple copies on same backup drive. sure wish there was a more solid backup method. as in cd, dvd, hdd all will not last forever. but hate to continue picture taking and in 5-10 years have to start all over again with backing up for the future.
    anyways

    Monty

    Reply
  9. Edward Casati Avatar
    Edward Casati

    Over 300GB, spread over multiple removable USB drives.
    If I had a DAM system that I liked, maybe I could tell you about how many ‘important enough to track’ files.

    Reply
  10. paulp Avatar
    paulp

    I’ve got about 250GB, the oldest photo I have is from 1995 which was scanned. You should compare the size of photo archives to the amount of hard drive space available… I’ve got about 2.1TB of storage at home.

    Reply
  11. Seb Payne Avatar
    Seb Payne

    Mine is quite ismall in comparison – 1,780 photos and 7.8gb. Since my interest for photography was rekindled this year, it has jumped by 3gb. Roll on 2006 :-)

    Reply
  12. Lorenz Szabo Avatar
    Lorenz Szabo

    Just 1.4 GB… Interestingly, over 1 GB of FLICKR photos…

    Reply
  13. Curtis Avatar
    Curtis

    about 700gb. damm all those raw files. what’s more sick is it’s all backed up to another array. :P

    Reply
  14. Nicolas Zinovieff Avatar
    Nicolas Zinovieff

    I’ve got about 12GB of pictures, but I’m relatively new to digital photography. Once the 10 000+ negatives will be scanned, however…
    Anyone knows a good way to scan this? I currently use a SilverBlue scanner from LaCie, but even in firewire, it’s slow as hell, and still manual.

    Reply
  15. chester Avatar
    chester

    somewhere getting close to one terrabyte. and that doesn’t include all the tens of thousands of slides i never scanned. i shoot raw and my master files are so large i have to break them up. if i combine them back together, a typical master file would probably be around 2.0-2.5GB. and i’m a packrat. i save almost everything and can never find the time to go back and weed them out. do i have a disease?

    Reply
  16. QT Luong Avatar
    QT Luong

    File size is hardly meaningful, without mentioning file formats. For instance, I have 6 250GB drives (plus backups) full of pictures, but most are 16bit TIF (either from digital or slide). If one counts only raw digital files, I have only a drive and half. However, this would be a lot of jpegs… better to ask for an image count.

    Reply
  17. Danny Avatar
    Danny

    I have about 3GB on family pictures and 2 GB on soccer pictures so its aboput 5GB in total

    Reply
  18. Don Avatar
    Don

    I have over 19,000 photos on my iMac G5 (Power PC). These include digital photos taken since 2001, scanned slides from 1958 to mid-80s, plus many scanned prints and negatives. Apple claims that iPhoto can now manage 25,000 images. We’ll see! As grandparents of 5 kiddies ages 6 down to 2, you can imagine the “photo ops!”

    BTW, Adam, are you related to Danny and Kitty Tow of San Diego? If so, I’ll send you some photos I took this a.m. as I walked past Miss China, now, sadly, closed after 31 years—but we look forward to seeing them around town……

    Reply
  19. Adam Avatar
    Adam

    Yes, they are. Send them my way and I’ll make sure they get them too!

    Reply
  20. LC Avatar
    LC

    Close to 30 GB but most of the pictures taken with a 2 megapixel camera (I am sooooo slow to upgrade technologies). Have a 10 megapixel SLR now (Xmas gift!) so will be needing new storage options very soon!

    Reply
  21. Anne Avatar
    Anne

    60 GB and I just bought my first digital camera this year. I do keep my husband and daughter’s images in my Aperture library also so I can be sure they are backed up and kept as organized and safe as possible. I haven’t scanned any of my old 35mm, med. format and 4×5 negs. since I still enjoy printing them the old-fashioned way in my darkroom.

    Reply
  22. latoga Avatar
    latoga

    As of today my photo collection is at about 475 Gig. Unfortunately, this doesn’t include many of my early digital photography as I had a hard drive failure back in 2004 and lost a substantial amount of my work from before that time. I expect this number to grow much more quickly once I upgrade my camera later this year (more MP means more Disk usage).

    After learning the hard way, backing up of all this data is of the utmost importance. Luckily, online photo backup has become a reality.

    Reply

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Adam, here

Welcome to tow.com, my home on the internet since 1995. I’m an indie software artist and creator of apps such as MixEffect, MsgFiler, AlbumFiler, Wipe My Screen, and more. I’m also the producer and co-director of Autumn Gem. Enjoy your visit here!

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