Context, or Don’t Delete Those Photos

Elvis may have left the build­ing… but he should still be lurk­ing around the archives.
With the ever increas­ing capac­ity and falling price of stor­age, is there a good rea­son to delete unused dig­i­tal images from a photo shoot? Take a look at what hap­pens when con­text changes (his­tory hap­pens) and old pho­tos sud­denly have new value (intrin­sic and finan­cial): new pho­tos of Elvis Pres­ley per­form­ing in 1972 have recently surfaced.

Kalin­sky said he didn’t real­ize at the time that he had so many good shots. “When I pho­tographed the show, I thought I only had a few good ones,” he said. “I just never really looked at the files until recently.”

Now, truth­fully, part of the excite­ment and big news from this story is that the pho­tos were just found after 36 years and the sub­ject has been deceased almost as long. But celebrity or not, when your sub­ject dies/marries/lies/wins/etc, your images may hold brand new mean­ing, per­haps fore­shad­ow­ing the cur­rent event or evok­ing sen­ti­ment or just uniquely bol­ster­ing the story. Why toss images away at all?
Of course, sav­ing every­thing requires that you have a decent way of track­ing what you have… and that’s a post for another day, but you already know how impor­tant dig­i­tal asset man­age­ment (DAM) is, don’t you?

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