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?