Storage Strategies: How to Manage Your Underwater Photography Archive

In this article adapted from The Underwater Photography Show, we tackle a question that came in from several listeners at the same time: how do you handle mass storage for underwater images, especially now that high-resolution cameras are eating up hard drive space faster than ever? Alex delves into the topic.

I want to start this with a few key questions, because if you answer them honestly, the storage problem is much less of a problem.

First, there's only so much time in your life for processing images. How many do you properly process? You might process a couple hundred pictures a year. Accept that and keeping many hundreds of times that number doesn't make much sense. I do think processing is going to change a lot in the next three or four years, with AI likely taking over a good chunk of Lightroom's role, pre-identifying and even pre-processing images based on how we like to work. Allowing us to process more. So there's an argument for keeping a bit more than you'll immediately process. But keeping 30 versions of the same shot is still silly, especially now that high-resolution, high-frame-rate cameras are monsters for eating up hard drives.

Second, what was the reason you took 30 pictures of a subject? It probably wasn't because you wanted 30 pictures — it's because you wanted one great shot, and you shot 30 to be sure, hoping something in the scene might happen to make one frame stand out. If you got that shot, then you probably don't need the other 29. And if nothing changed and all 30 are basically the same, then you also only need to keep one!

Third, does your audience want to see all 30 pictures? They want to see your best work. Even with winning images where you have 29 technically excellent similars, there is little point in keeping them all.

And finally, for me, I don't feel that RAW files themselves are that valuable. For me, processed files are much more so. Once I've chosen my best shots, identified the subjects, processed the file, written a caption, and keyworded it, that file has real worth to me and I want to keep it safe. The original RAW, by contrast, I'm only likely to need again if there's a major shift in processing technology that makes it worth reprocessing. Or if I am going to enter it in a contest (which for me is a rare occurrence). There have been huge changes in processing since I started shooting digital underwater photography almost 25 years ago, yet I've reprocessed hardly any of my shots from the early 2000s. I'm still happy with them as processed at the time. Sure, there are files I ignored back then because the processing technology couldn't save them — mostly, though, I'd rather spend my energy processing the huge backlog of newer pictures I've never gotten to.

My first pillar of a good storage policy is deleting effectively, as encouraged above. But going through pictures isn't just about culling — I want to actually look at each one and learn from it. If I'm sorting through, say, a batch of model shots from Cayman, it's often small nuances that separate a keeper from a non-keeper, and that's valuable information: next time, I'll remember what I liked, and time and compose shots accordingly. I can also tell a model to try one thing and avoid another, which raises my keeper rate. Culling images always generates notes to myself — "do this, don't do that" or "try this idea again, but do it better and you might be onto something!" In short, I learn from culling pictures, but I don't need to keep them to retain the lesson. If a shot feels worth keeping purely as a reference, I might export it as a low-res JPEG rather than holding onto the original RAW of what is, ultimately, a mistake shot.

From a normal trip, I keep about 10 to 15% of what I shoot. Most of what gets deleted is very good — it's just too similar to another frame I've judged marginally better. People often struggle when they've shot a series of 20 or 30 nearly identical frames and can't bring themselves to pick a favorite. Sometimes you have to accept that a run of shots is essentially the same image and you only need one of them — don't waste energy agonizing over whether it's marginally better with a tiny damselfish here versus there and end up keeping them all. Small differences in fish placement can occasionally transform a shot from average to special, especially with lots of small fish in a wide angle scene, but if a difference genuinely isn't affecting your reaction to the image, it isn't worth lots of deliberation.

My advice: shoot as much as you want, and don't feel obligated to change how you approach your underwater photography because of storage concerns — but edit hard. I don't usually edit as I shoot, mainly because I'm usually busy running a workshop when I am in the field, but I do edit hard a week or two after a trip, once I've got some distance from it. On a typical trip I'll shoot around 5,000 pictures a week and keep roughly 600–700 of those — so on a two-week trip, that's about 10,000 images shot. It varies a lot by destination and subject matter. On my most recent Cayman trip, I shot about 10,000 frames and edited down to 1,149 — around 10–12% kept, which is fairly typical for me. I don't overthink why I keep a shot (there is time later) — if I want to keep it, I do — it might be because it's good, rare, or a nice memory. I think about what I delete and why and accept for the reasons above that I just don't need to keep everything.

On that note, here's how I handle storage in practice. I use small SanDisk solid-state drives for backups on the road, plus solid-state storage in my laptop, which reduces the risk of hard drive failure — though nothing is completely secure. On most trips I only carry one backup drive; I know plenty of people insist that fewer than three copies means the files don't really exist, but solid-state drives rarely die, and honestly a lot of the time I only back up once. If it's a particularly critical trip, I might bring two. I also tend to be lazy about it and often don't back up until the end of a trip. But don't do as I do. The best advice is to download to your laptop and two separate hard drives, to have those 3 copies!

In-camera, I run two cards: an SD card that stays in permanently as overflow, and a CompactFlash Express card as my main save card, which covers roughly two days of shooting. I try to format that card daily, though I sometimes forget — which is why the two-day capacity works out well. As a Sony shooter, cards are expensive, so I'd rather buy more computer storage than buy a stack of second-rate cards to swap through a trip. I've only had around two card failures across 25 years of digital photography, both early on. What we do isn't life-and-death critical — if I were the sole photographer capturing some major event, like a wedding, I'd back up to a second card as I shoot, but in our photography, losing a shot of a fish isn't the end of the world. You can always go back out and get another amazing shot the next day.

In the field, I typically come home with a copy of the files on my laptop and a copy on a portable drive. Once home, those trip hard drives get set aside and don't travel again until I have sorted and stored the images properly. Once I've whittled a trip down to the number I want to keep, those get transferred to my long-term storage drive. I don't delete the original trip backups (on the hard drives) until I need the space (usually a year or so later), giving me a way back to recent shots, in case something gets lost before I process it out. Touch wood, I've never needed this.

I do make a second copy of my long-term storage drive. I do this manually, just making my own mirrored copies, but I don't use a RAID system anymore. I used to, and it was noisy and irritating — and with spinning hard drives, I actually had more disc failures in the RAID setup than on any other drive I've used. Yes, it's still technically backed up when a drive goes down, but then you're stuck for a while not able to access anything while it rebuilds itself, which I didn't like. Now I just use normal hard drives and mirror them when I remember (usually after I copy some exciting new images).

For my favourite images, a top 250 from that 1000 keepers from a 10,000 image trip, I have a parallel copy of them. These are my priority processing and potential contest images — and pulling them out makes them easier to find and work on. Also because any contest shots will come from these, it is extra important to keep the RAW files. I try to process my favourites from a trip fairly soon after returning, because nothing makes a picture safer than having a fully processed, captioned, keyworded high-resolution version — maybe already submitted to a photo library. I keep two copies of these favourite RAW files — but we're only talking a couple of hundred per trip — so it is not a heavy storage issue.

I don't use cloud storage for any of my RAW files. But I do for all my processed files. As these are useable by clients, and good enough for almost any usage. Plus they have had the processing time, keywording time etc poured into them. Honestly the real work is always post shooting (it only takes a moment to click a picture), but culling, choosing, adjusting in Lightroom, despotting, captioning, and keywording takes far longer, and that's the work I'm actually most concerned with protecting.

The overall approach: don't keep too much, edit your work hard and treat that editing process as a learning opportunity, then once you've got a manageable number, pick your favorites and really look after those. Don't waste storage on pictures you don't need. A folder with a thousand images from a single day in the Red Sea, when you know only one of them is a genuine keeper, just means wading through a thousand pictures every time you want to find the good one. And most of the time you won't bother and the picture is backed up — but lost to you.

Most underwater photographers' standards rise over time, so pictures that feel important today may matter less in three years if you're on an upward learning curve. There are exceptions — genuinely once-in-a-lifetime moments, or old shots that become useful later as the underwater world changes — but overall, strong culling gives you a chance to learn and makes finding your good shots a whole lot easier later.

If you'd like to watch the full episode, check it out below: