With just a few days to go before the end of year I find myself asking the same question as every other year end. Why do I keep all my pictures as Tif files? 50% o f the picture libraries I supply are now only taking Jpeg files and I suspect the others will follow shortly. Nearly all pictures are sent out to customers online and as Jpeg files. Libraries are saying to themselves why save them as much larger Tif files when we never sell Tifs any more; and there is no noticeable loss of quality in Jpegs.
The saving on disk or server space is huge, around 75% less space required when a Jpeg is saved at full size and the highest quality. It is time I made the decision. It means my current hard drive capacity will last for years and I will no longer have the almost annual task of changing my drives for every larger ones.
At the end of each year I take an external drive copy of my master picture disk that contains all my raw and Tif files and I freeze it, never to be used again. I have one for each year and it is incremental, meaning each one contains every year up to that point. This is in addition to my other copies of my master picture drive. I have an internal drive copy of it and two USB external drives, one of which is stored off site. I swop the external drives from time to time, bringing the off site one home to bring it up to date and taking the other one away.
This year I will start to only save my 2012 pictures as large Jpeg files. Unless I hit a snag by the end of the year I will convert all my previous Tif files to Jpegs too. It should be a simple automatic job to do.
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