Ian Plant

Tips for Managing Your Raw Files

Ian Plant
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Duration:   3  mins

If you are a serious photographer, you are capturing your digital photos in the RAW file format because of its highest possible image quality yielding the best quality edit. However, RAW files take up storage space and require efficient management. In this free video, world renowned outdoor photographer Ian Plant gives you tips on RAW file management.

He suggests you organize your RAW files into folders sorted by category such as wildlife, landscapes, family, friends, and sports. Then, you process your favorite file images in Lightroom, Photoshop, or another editing software system. If you want to save those RAW files that you do not process, you need to remove them from your computer or they will take up valuable space. Ian stores his unprocessed RAW files on an external storage drive. He recommends the Promise Technology Pegasus2 RAID external drive.

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4 Responses to “Tips for Managing Your Raw Files”

  1. RONALD

    You hit the nail on the head. aka The KISS formula. Thank you

  2. Gary Cralle

    Hi Ian, thanks for your comments regarding storage. How do you prevent raw files stored on external HDs from appearing as an image program icon (such as Topaz S for Sharpen or DXO-PL) instead of the original image?

  3. Wesley Mitchell

    Why bother to make a video if you really don't do much in the way of managing these files? Managing, to me, means organizing them so that you can find them, possibly years later; storing them, and backing them up. No useful info here except that you use a pair of 10Tb RAID systems; why RAID? You gave a little info on how you import photos into some folder structure, but no global view of that structure.

  4. Stan

    Thank you for your great raw data management tips!

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